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.

  • Loose connected networks

    In order to tell you about loose connected networks, I wanted to tell you about my friend Heather. During the dot com era when I started my agency career, Heather and I were pod (as in cubicle) neighbours at the same agency for 2 1/2 years.

    The last time we worked together was almost five years ago. However we have managed to keep in touch over the past five years via email on an irregular basis, the occasional phone call and kept up to speed with the happenings in each others lives.

    Heather is a classic example of a loose connected networks within my professional life.One which would not have been realistically possible without the benefit of email. This network maintenance with people who I have known through different phases of my life is a key example of how the Internet has altered our social fabric and social networks such as LinkedIn, SoFlow and Orkut have tried to codify this process.

    The value of loose connected networks to me is very tangible. I went on a business trip to Silicon Valley whilst at Yahoo!. Heather met me at San Francisco airport, gave me a tour of Silicon Valley and on my one night off, took me to the Sunnyvale town market and custom car show.

    Being in a strange place and being able to kick back with a friend who is a local, but at the same time gets where you are coming from was priceless. Being able to find a bar with a proper Irish fry up with black and white pudding makes her even more valuable!.

    I got to see a more human personal Silicon Valley than some of my peers who dismiss the place as being dull.

    Certainly Sunnyvale felt small, but then why wouldn’t it when most of the major employers provide most of lifes requirements on giant campuses and you can buy everything else at the out-of-town Walmart or Target store. Being a European I was reminded of the small town mythology perpertrated in US films like American Grafitti, Back the Future and ET. Having been to Sunnyvale it all made sense. More ideas related content here.

  • Breakfast clubs

    Its easy having worked in the media to lose touch with what happens in society. When I read in the FT on Saturday about Greggs the Bakers’ school breakfast clubs I was impressed and disturbed at the same time.

    Firstly the disturbed bit, I went to school in a hardship hit area where many kids queued to get free school meals, I managed to avoid it myself as my Dad managed to keep working. The recession hit 80s I thought were long gone, its a lot easier to get work now. The breakfast clubs reminded me that the child poverty one associated with my parents day and before; despite family credit and new deal schemes designed to alleviate real poverty. It seemed like something one would have expected when there were the dark satanic mills and dank industrial landscapes portrayed in LS Lowry paintings and sketches where working-class people toiled on the edge of existence and children were at risk of catching rickets and got their shoes from a ‘boot club’. Instead of the dark satanic mills, there are now warehouses with zero hour contract employees. This isn’t even the old day wages suffered by construction workers and stevedores working day rates pre-containerisation on the docks. 

    If this carries on the political centre won’t hold with this level of poverty.

    I was impressed by the way Greggs have taken positive steps to help communities deal with this by funding the food and equipment like toasters and having their own staff train volunteers who cater for the breakfast clubs. Breakfasts improve punctuality and help the children concentrate on their morning lessons, since many of them would not have eaten until lunch time. The campaign seems to be a text-book case of corporate and social responsibility activity. Apparently the scheme costs them in the region of 250,000GBP per annum and puts to shame the Big Food companies who have far more resources at their disposal and are in desperate need of far more goodwill. What do you think? More related posts here.

  • Duracell toy trends

    Battery supremos Duracell have conducted a Europe-wide survey on the most popular toys this Christmas. Full details can be found here. The report is available as a PDF, the most interesting part of the report is the survey insights section which highlighted some cultural trends amongst children and the differences across Europe. I have summarised Duracell toy trends below:

    • Action is the strongest draw for boys with radio controlled cars and race tracks. This goes against everything that we’re told about ‘generation playstation’ and the move to mobile and online entertainment
    • Fashion and beauty is the big draw for girls – the Smoby Star Party CD which allowed girls to become a singer a la Pop Idol or Fame Academy was a winner in this category

    Both of these findings in the Duracell toy trends research

    UK:USA

    • The UK was considered to have consumption patterns closer to the US than Europe
    • More toys were bought and more money spent in the UK than other European countries

    Northern versus Southern Europe

    • Northern European children prefer being outdoors taking part in sport
    • Southern European children prefer to play indoors with computer games and watching television. I was surprised by this given the football culture and better weather
    • Southern European children receive a higher amount of pocket money than Northern European children. But Northern European children start receiving pocket money at a younger age
    • Northern European children discover new toys through multiple channels: word of mouth, television, magazines, print advertisements, retail displays and catalogues
    • Southern European children primarily discover new toys through television
    • Southern European parents put a greater emphasis on educational value when purchasing toys

  • Digital Natives

    Digital natives is a generational term rather like generation x which is starting to hit the mainstream. A digital native is someone who has growth up in close contact with computers Mark Prensky hypothesised and found some proof to indicate that these people absorb and process information in a different manner to those of us old enough to remember the analogue world. The term digital native comes from Prensky’s view that these people are native speakers of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet. This has implications for teaching, advertising and the media.

    Just because someone has grown up with computer technology does not mean that they particularly want and like immersive experiences like video games. I am sure that there will be personality and learning types within the digital natives group as there are within the immigrants: some are better at learning by rote, others by doing.

    Those of us that have adapted to this world are considered to be digital immigrants rather than digital natives. Prensky then goes on to forecast the demise of printed materials amongst other items, but if thats the case why is Amazon so successful? Why are young people buying increasing amounts of vinyl?

    To find out how good a digital immigrant you really are, try this quiz courtesy of AlwaysOn.

    Wired has an article yet again on the death of print media because of technologically savvy young people based on the findings of these surveys here and here. News print has declined for years before the rise of the public internet and web browsers.

    Finally Piper Jaffray have been hyping up the Apple share price with a target to hit 100 USD from 61 and change. This based on the results of a survey that they think indicates that the iPod will turn a significant number of iPod owning PC users into Mac users. More gadget related posts can be found here.

     

     

     

     

     

  • Marketing crisis

    Marketing crisis in competence and capability: Creative Business has a great leading article based on research conducted by The Marketing Society and McKinsey called Marketing in Crisis.

    When you think about the marketing crisis, you also need to think about the people providing the feedback. Other board colleagues might have a stilted or inaccurate view of what marketing does. But at the very least there seems to be a marketing crisis in miscommunication.

    A second aspect of this marketing crisis report is to ask what’s in it for The Marketing Society and McKinsey. The Marketing Society would be looking to professionalise marketing and differentiate from the Chartered Institute of Marketing. McKinsey would look to deposition marketing teams so that it can sell additional services.

    Key takeaways from the report include:

    • Marketers are seen as creative but undisciplined
    • Marketers don’t understand their own businesses
    • In marketing led businesses such as FMCG (fast moving consumer goods), marketing is too important to be left to the marketers
    • Marketing attracts the wrong kind of people
    • Marketers are undisciplined
    • Marketers are not interested in the P&L

    So this also might explain many of the client horror stories that I hear from agency veterans in PR, advertising, design and branding.

    The Buy Buy Generation

    Young Japanese women are consumers with a high disposable income, publishers target them with ‘product porn’ style magazines focusing on luxury handbags, shoes and clothing. UK publishers are now looking to copy this format. What surprised me about this article is that it did not draw comparisions with the product porn gadget magazines targeted at young men in the UK like Stuff and T3.

    Anybody walking the streets of London will have realised young Japanese are the most stylish people on the planet and avid collectors of the latest thing. On a related note the British boutique with a Japanese name Oki Ni have teamed up with the Adidas vintage connection to do two cool exclusive versions of Adidas’ ‘Torsion Special lo’ trainers here and here. These were the ultimate ravers trainer when they originally came out in the early 1990’s, they fit like a glove, are light, good cushioning, came in a multitude of colours (my originals were predominantly purple) and have a sole that will grip to any warehouse floor.