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.
Walmart has built over 100 Walmart store of the future designs. Some of the elements seek emulate the best bits of Target with seasonal low priced items close to the door and a more experiential approach to merchandising.
https://flic.kr/p/oTMfZ7
Mike Mozart
Some of the other changes in the Walmart store of the future include QRcodes on signage and a Walmart smartphone app for self-checkout show a blending of real world and digital, or as we like to call it here, the web of no web.
CIA director William Burns
CIA William Burns gave this wide ranging talk in February 2023. It seems apropos to share it here. Burns was involved in the Middle East before and through much of GWoT (global war on terror). Burns commentary on the Middle East at the time is very much worthwhile about thinking about now. Burns’ book The Back Channel was frank about his failings as well as successes when it was published back in 2021.
Burns handled the Ukraine conflict particularly well in the early stages. His comments on Israel and Palestine look particularly prophetic now, even though western intelligence agencies were shocked by what happened on October 7, 2023.
I’m sorry to be so uplifting today about the international landscape, and I also have to say that, you know, in the conversations I had with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, you know, I think it left me quite concerned about the prospects for even greater fragility and even greater violence between Israelis and Palestinians as well. You know, I was, as Barbara mentioned, a senior U.S. Diplomat 20 years ago during the Second Intifada, and I’m concerned, as are my colleagues in the intelligence community, the lot of what we’re seeing today has a very unhappy resemblance to some of those realities that we saw then too.
William J Burns
Operation Shady RAT
How an experimental honey pot simulating computerised industrial systems reveal the long term hacking programme done by APT 1 for the Chinese government. The RAT in question was a ‘remote access trojan’ piece of malware.
Irish radio broadcasting
RTÉ, the Irish public broadcaster started broadcasting radio programmes in 1926. At the time it was called 2RN, it became by Radio Athlone, which was eventually called Radio Éireann in 1938. The ‘T’ came in after to the first television broadcasts in 1961.
RTÉ was central to my identity as an Irishman spending a good deal of my childhood in Britain – my culture, language and literature came through the speakers. The programmes now conveyed online offer my parents an information lifeline to everything happening at home since the long wave and medium wave radio services were shut down. This documentary from 2001 reflects one the first 75 years of Irish radio broadcasting.
Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott: The Canceling of the American Mind
Talk at the Churchill Club of California about their book The Cancelling of the American Mind. It is interesting hear Rikki Schlott reference The Coddling of The American Mind, which Lukianoff co-wrote with Jonathan Haidt. In Cancelling the authors look to document some of the failings in how cancel culture works on campus and in the workplace. It is much more of a partisan work than Coddling, mainly because it driven by Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The comparison to the red scare of the 1950s are interesting.
China’s rule is described by the German government as guided by ideology. Germany has pulled away from its historic strategy due to China’s approach being guided by ideology. The classification of systemic rival due to China’s guided by ideology approach sets the German government against pro-China businesses including BASF, Daimler-Benz, Deutsche Telekom and Volkswagen Group.
Chinese acquisitions of German specialist companies have been guided by ideology as much as business benefit. Germany let go critical companies like Kuka – the robotics specialist to specialist construction equipment.
Sentiment in the Mittelstand industrial base of Germany has turned negative as China’s rule became increasingly guided by ideology.
Apple discriminated against US citizens in hiring, DOJ says | Ars Technica – investigation “found that Apple engaged in a pattern or practice of citizenship status discrimination in recruitment for positions it hired through PERM, and that the company’s unlawful discrimination prejudiced US citizens, US nationals, lawful permanent residents, and those granted asylum or refugee status. These less effective recruitment practices deterred protected workers from applying to positions that Apple preferred to fill instead with PERM beneficiaries.” Apple did not advertise PERM positions on its external job website like it does with other positions, the DOJ said. “It also required all PERM position applicants to mail paper applications, even though the company permitted electronic applications for other positions,” the DOJ said. – Bob Cringely had been talking about similar antics at IBM for years. I expect that you will see this across the technology sector
Alstom: the French train giant battling to stay on the rails – “If Alstom had a problem, the whole of France would find itself pretty stuck,” given the company supplies most of the country’s trains and metros, said an executive at a rival manufacturer. “It can pose a major industrial risk.”
Klick Wire | Telehealth top app type for 45+ – it all comes down to how you define telehealth and how app versus ‘system’ usage is measured. I would imagine alarm and SMS / messaging would still rank very high
Hong Kong
Hong Kong man wanted over fatal hold-up shooting arrested after 32 years on the run | South China Morning Post – its like a vintage Chow Yun Fat film, but in real life. In the years running up to recolonisation there were a lot of armed robbers perpetrated by mainlanders who would come in do the job and return. These jobs often used AK pattern weapons, apparently from China but just as likely left over from the wars that ravaged South East Asia
How Israel’s spymasters misread Hamas | FT – before Hamas launched its October 7 attack, Avi Issacharoff, co-creator of Israel’s hit television thriller Fauda, rejected a possible plotline for one episode in which Hamas fighters stormed the border fence and attacked Israel, deeming it too implausible. Israel’s security services apparently thought the same.
I read about soft girls, when a friend shared an article from Glamour magazine with me.
Glamour
Glamour is a women’s magazine published by Conde Nast. When it launched in the UK, it was famous for its ‘handbag format’ size, which then spurred innovation in the summer editions of men’s magazines. Nowadays it’s important for its beauty-led content. But it covers other aspects of wellness through to personal finance.
What is a soft girl?
Soft girl seems to be an extension of quiet quitting. Soft girls was considered to be an aspirational lifestyle. Soft girls are about the now, they don’t want a high-achieving high-flyer. Instead it about being in tune with herself: energy levels, her moods and her menstrual cycle. They’d like to live slowly, read books, artistic pursuits and making dinner for their partner or family.
https://flic.kr/p/aeWZ5R
Many working women can’t to go ‘full soft girl’ and quit working due to having bills to pay. Ultimately, it’s a sub-set of an idealised lifestyle shared on TikTok and Instagram by some women.
Why soft girl mattered?
I received the article wrapped in a critique:
Soft girl lifestyle implies immense social privilege to live a life of leisure.
It would put feminist achievements back decades.
Sharing such content set a bad example for girls and teenagers.
It was a social conservative version of Elysian fields for women who knew their place.
It wasn’t a proper piece of journalism.
Like the gender neutral quiet quitting, it’s a rejection of the rat race at a time when the deck is stacked against workers. In this respect it’s rather similar to the story of generation X slackers who were dealing with Reagonomics and a jobs market devastated by globalisation and automation.
Why soft girls don’t actually matter.
The whole story is based on a central conceit – that cohorts of people, generations if you will are somehow unique and special. The reality is that doesn’t hold true as much as you think. We change as we go through life stages, but there is more that binds us than differentiates us from one and other.
Group cohesion scores ( a measure of how much a given community holds a common set of values measured across 419 statements). In the UK population as a whole, the average majority opinion is held by 48.7% of the population. BBH looked at how generations scored on this measure and found that they differed from the overall population about +1.3, ‘gen-z’ cleaved even closer to the population norm with a difference of -0.2. Generations have no stronger connections to each other than the rest of the population.
Longitudinal patterns.
Remember when I talked earlier about the story of generation X opting out, instead choosing to hold down a McJob and becoming a slacker due to cynicism fuelled by Reaganomics, the cold war and poor employment prospects? It turns out that a Stanford research project found that the cynicism-fuelled life view was down to cross-generational increase in cynicism, rather than gen-Xers. However, the label stuck and marketers missed out on a valuable insight.
The Economist recently highlighted Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2023 Report. A survey that it uses to promote its corporate employment engagement practice to help business managers become effective coaches to their teams and use ‘science-based management’.
Gallup describes the survey as ‘the voice of the world’s employees’. In their introduction Gallup discuss how low engagement is costing the global economy about 9% of global GDP, because 59% of employees are ‘quietly quitting’. A further 18% were ‘loud quitting’ or actively disengaged from work. On those numbers alone, quiet quitting is cross-generational in nature.
https://flic.kr/p/2petoZ5
And actively engaged employees have been increasing over the past decade and a half. This increase in work engagement came against a background of progressively increasing daily stress levels at work.
https://flic.kr/p/2pesaBZ
The most reliable indicators of engagement were whether the person was able to work remotely (high engagement) or in a workplace (lower engagement) and management (high) versus individual contributor (low). Women were slightly more engaged than men and age showed no difference.
Soft girls might be just a dreamy balm to get them through the daily grind.
In Canada, as with other countries a beep electronic sound punctuated the correct time. In Canada, this is called the long dash because of its extended tone. In the UK and Ireland I have heard it called the ‘pips‘ three short beeps instead.
Consistency and precision
Before we had precise time mediated by a beep; consistency was still important. The time was marked in different ways:
Church bells
Farm estate clocks
Railway station clocks
Factory sirens
While this time would be consistent on a daily or weekly cycle, it gradually became apparent that it could differ from one town to another. Accurate time was crucial for mariners looking to gain an understanding of how east or west they were – their position in terms of longitude . You compare the position of the sun in the sky, how far it is on its access at midday GMT time and then back calculate your position. But marine chronometers were not commonplace onshore.
https://flic.kr/p/4Ui54r
Half a century after the development of the chronometer, George Stephenson’s work developing the steam locomotive started what we now think of as railways and the Bessemer steel process allowed for mass production of railway tracks. Railway timetables were the point at which widespread consistency and precision were needed, with a country (or at least a time zone in the case of large countries like Russia, Canada and the United States) having a common time.
Radio
Radio programmes carrying some sort of time signals allowed a country to use watches and clocks that weren’t chronometer accurate that could be periodically compared and reset against the beep of the time signal.
The delay in propagating a time signal in most countries was not meaningful. The beep also featured on speaking clock services where a caller could dial in to a telephone line at a time of their choosing to receive the precise time to the second, every ten seconds. BT still provides the service in the UK. They are used less frequently with the rise of quartz watches, mobile phones and computers.
The Angelus
In Ireland, Roman Catholic heritage combined with the need for a time signal meant that the bells were rung on TV and radio at 12 noon and 6pm for The Angelus. When the Angelus started on the radio, Roman Catholic households would be able to mutter the prayer to themselves. Having it on the radio also served a socio-political purpose as well as a time marking purpose in the Ireland of Eamon DeValera where piousness was a key part of the Irish identity the young country looked to foster.
Modern Ireland, particularly in the urban areas is a very different, more diverse Ireland than the rural-dominated Ireland of DeValera
RTÉ aside
Before Ireland went to a 24 hour broadcast schedule on RTÉ radio 1, the station turned on at 5:30am with an electronically created interval signal that was a more tuneful version of the beep.
This repeated at regular intervals until 6am when the announcer would the start of programming. It often marked my time to get up for my milk round or shift work.
It still appears at the same time, announcing the transition of overnight programming shared with RTÉ Gold to radio one’s first programme of the day Rising Time.
Technology systems
Accuracy was improved by the invention of the first atomic clock in 1955. This built on theoretical work that had been done from the 1930s onwards in the area of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) devices. By the mid-1960s Hewlett-Packard were building 19″ rack mountable atomic clocks, eventually it became small enough to squeeze on a satellite. By 2004, researchers had built an atomic clock mechanism the size of a coffee bean.
Atomic clock time codes are a crucial part of global positioning satellite signals. Mobile operators have used these. Then there are several radio stations around the world on shortwave and long wave transmitters who send out a regular time code. These timecodes are used to correct clocks and watches including Casio watches with the ‘Multiband 6 feature‘.
Prior to widespread adoption of the internet, computer network workstations, be they Mac or PC would have different times on them, usually set by the user or the system administrator at the computer. While mobile phone networks could distribute accurate time signals to mobile phones, they often didn’t. Some networks supported the summer time transfer, others didn’t.
The internet and workstation grade PC operating systems provided an opportunity for widespread use of network time protocol servers. Sudden your Mac and later on your iPhone and iPad would all have the same time.
Internet time problems
The internet, while providing a format for distributing relatively accurate time to machines has presented its own problem propagating time to humans. There can be a substantial amount of time difference between different ways of receiving broadcast content. The difference is most apparent between internet streaming and terrestrial broadcast radio and television. A good deal of this is down to the nature of best effort packet networks that support the modern web. Video and audio are buffered to provide a seamless experience rather than a precise experience. So time signals on IPTV and audio streamed radio are indicative at best rather than having precision.
Omakase is a Japanese term that has become popular in Korea. Omakase as a phrase comes from the term ‘makaseru’ meaning to entrust. In a sushi restaurant omakase meant the customer turned over responsibility for choosing their menu to the sushi chef. The chef would choose the type of fish and the cut. They would assemble the sushi in front of the customer, tell them what it was and choose the next piece, based on what they think the customer should try next. It is likely to have developed sometime in the last two centuries when nigiri sushi became popular. This was sushi that could be quickly assembled in front of the customer – which is essential for the way omakase operates.
Omakase experience
The personalised nature of the experience and the choice of ingredients by the chef rather than the customer means that omakase is an expensive experience. The ingredients will be seasonal in nature and the chef will select the finest ingredients available.
A short trip across the Sea of Japan (or what the Koreans call the East Sea) is South Korea. And it was inevitable that this particular type of sushi experience would cross the waters as well, given that it has already made it the best sushi restaurants in the US and Europe.
https://flic.kr/p/71yLrb
Gangnam at night by laurabl
Expansion of Omakase
In Korea omakase took off some time before 2020. At first it was in upscale sushi restaurants. Then it extended itself into tempura in the Japanese restaurants of high end hotels in Seoul, you see this in some restaurants in Japan as well.
It started to spread throughout the country beyond Seoul and as it grew geographically within Korea, it was extended beyond Japanese cuisine.
Western dessert tasting menu as an omakase experience
Coffee tasting with your own barista. Coffee fuels Korean work life and is immensely popular.
Champagne tasting with a personalised experience from a sommelier.
It has been even extended to grilled pork belly – a stable dish of Korean neighbourhood restaurants. Rather than barbecuing it yourself, pieces are selected and grilled for you by a personal chef.
Why ‘Korean omakase’ happened?
In Korea you have a confluence of factors affecting young consumers.
Korea is known for its luxury consumption. On a per capita basis, Koreans spend more on luxury personal goods than any other country. Harrods has been surpassed as the number one retailer in luxury goods by the Shinsegae department store branch in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Korea with $2 billion dollars of sale in 2021.
Like young consumers in many developed markets, young Koreans have money in their pocket but are unlikely to be able to afford to buy their own home. Korea’s ultra-wealthy have a good deal of their wealth in buy to let property.
The Jeonse system of home rental exasperates the home ownership problem. A Jeonse tenancy begins with the initial security deposit of a single amount which is usually about 40% to as much as 80% of the current market value of the property. Unlike in most of Europe, the interest yield on the deposit will not be paid to the tenant, but the landlord can keep this as income. No additional monthly rent is paid. On expiry of the contract period, the original deposit will be refunded in full.
This leaves young (and not so young) Koreans heavily indebted and makes it hard to plan for the future.
Live for today, the future is lost anyway
So young Koreans spend on luxury consumption now, rather than save for a future that they believe is unaffordable. While Korean is a developed economy with successful industries, one in ten of young Koreans are unemployed. When they look at the generation of Koreans who built the country over from the post-war years into the developed economy it is today; 45% of these elderly live in poverty.
Omakase as social standing
Luxury consumption is used to reflect a higher social standing. Korea is known for a high degree of conformity, which creates big fashion winners. Once a trend picks up, it goes everywhere, but then also has a finite life as brands like The North Face have found to its cost in the past as consumers move with the crowd.
But Korea is also a Confucian society which means that social standing matters, and this is where the luxury consumption comes in. The quest has moved into online channels as well, with these channels showing to your peers your social standing.
Jeong
The social platforms act as a pressure point in modern Korean life. Because of social, luxury experiences like omakase become as important as having luxury goods.
In Korea, the power of social is amplified by jeong (정) – can be considered to be a sense of social responsibility. Jeong is a positive force for conformity and community in a collectivist society. Historically, jeong is built through shared experiences, such as eating together and a sense of community bond is formed.
Aspects of jeong include
Scheduling quality time with loved ones.
Create meaningful shared experiences.
Expand and engage with your community.
Modern urban and digital life has disrupted Korean society which has meant that values like jeong manifest themselves in new ways.
Mukbang aside
The principles of jeong is where mukbang videos originally came from. Mukbang started as streaming videos where the host would share a virtual meal with the viewers and interact with them. Korean meals are designed to be shared, yet a third of Koreans live in single person households. Mukbang provided the lonely with shared experiences that had a degree of meaning in their lives – creating a kind of virtual jeong between the host and the audience. Now they are genre of video content that’s carefully edited and removed from the original social context that they came from.
Getting back to jeong, think about your Instagram feed for a moment, think about how you might feel if you have had a mediocre day and your feed is filled with people you know living their best lives. Now dial that up to 11.
Sharing content is engaging with your wider community and growing your community and sharing experiences with them. There is a corresponding pressure to share experiences back within your feeds. This has driven a demand for luxury products and experiences including omakase.
Omakase is a rational economic response. There are only so many times that you can share a new bag or watch costing thousands of pounds. But you can share omakase each time you go, with the price being in the hundreds of pounds instead.
So where does the money come from?
Omakase experiences aren’t an everyday thing for young Koreans; they would think its perfectly fine most days to eat a lunch bargain meal from a convenience store and then do an omakase experience every so often that they can document it on social media.
Korean households have the highest amount of debt in the world, and over 21% of young Koreans have personal debt that at least three times their salary. A decade earlier, the rate was 8.2%.
So what?
Korea today is a cultural powerhouse. Trends that start here go worldwide. Korea is involved in all aspects of global culture:
Cinema.
Television series.
Beauty.
Fashion.
FMCG products.
Food.
Korea’s role as a global trendsetter has not gone unnoticed, Christian Dior opened its flagship store in Seoul and held its collection debut in Korea over China or France.
Luxury businesses already realise that consumers want status experiences as well as status goods. LVMH has been actively exploring the hotel and restaurant business, as has Kering. But these businesses have lower margins than their existing businesses. The way to increase these margins would be to address less customers and charge even more.
Luxury is being redefined into highly personalised experiences by consumers and it makes commercial sense for luxury businesses to meet their needs.
While luxury groups are looking at cutting edge technology like generative AI, NFTs and metaverse experiences, the future of luxury might be more human, as well as more technology.
