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.
Sixt Halloween ad combines a Stranger Things aesthetic with a hard-hitting competition comparison at the core of the creative. I would put money on it that the production leaned heavily on generative AI. I’ve used Sixt previously and they were ok as a car rental company, they won my business many on price and location of their pick-up points for vehicles. It will be interesting if they can build this Halloween execution into a wider ongoing brand building campaign that turns Sixt into a car rental juggernaut.
How QRcode payments took off in India?
UX commentator Phoebe Yu did a really good video exploring why QRcode based payments took off in India. India has learned from and adopted some of the O2O experience in China and used it in a different context.
Jeep Grand Wagoneer ‘The Family’ advert
On one hand given how the current US administration relies on the support of the religious white, this advert is brave. I am also amazed they managed to hang a 3-minute film from one statement in a car review by Jalopnik.
All the best people are dogs
Life 360 have built a campaign around a banger of a human insight that all dog owners know. Their dog always owns a good deal of their human’s mental real estate, by latching on to that space Life 360 were looking to cut through Apple AirTag’s fame in the space.
Great ideas start on a Mac
There are several Apple films that I could have put up here. Aside from great craft, all these films have one other thing in common – too little media spend to actually get them seen by a relevant audience.
Keep thinking with Claude
Anthropic have come with a great brand anthem of a film. While it may have been produced with LLM generated video, it also shows the very human feature of great taste behind it. All of which fits into the idea of AI as collaborator.
Another year, another macOS. Tahoe is sensibly unambitious but it has raised some ire amongst Mac users. You can tell how unambitious Tahoe was, when CNET had to do an article showing you how common app icons have changed because you otherwise probably didn’t notice. I know I didn’t.
Tahoe is neither here nor there as a release for me. I haven’t found features that are ‘can’t live without”. The app interface changes feel different for the sake of being different, but I quickly got used to them.
In terms of quality it still feels a bit ‘beta’-ish but I hope that the bugs get ironed out over time.
The pop-up window to select my accent over the ‘o’ in my given name gets blanked out for some reason.
When performing certain actions, the browser chrome all turns white.
Otherwise things have been fine so far. My anti-virus of choice launched an update soon after Tahoe came out. As has my VPN client and numerous utilities and apps that I use for work, or just keeping my Mac tuned up.
I have a Brother mono laser printer to connect up, (as my long-suffering HP unit finally gave up the ghost after a decade of service,) which might be a bit of a trial if Reddit is anything to judge by.
Last Week on My Mac: Tahoe’s elephant – The Eclectic Light Company – this critique points out the kind of issues with Tahoe that implies it isn’t the Macintosh operating system of Steve Jobs with its historic focus on art principles and typography right from the beginning.
Dutch seizure of chipmaker followed US ultimatum over Chinese chief | FT – the judgement paints a bit more of a nuanced picture with two independent actions. It also explicitly states that the government order is not final yet (and at that point would still be open to appeals). The actual matter involved is a (significant) breach of fiduciary duty by Zhang Xuezheng and the holding company (Yuching). Cited issues were:
Placing of orders to another Wingtech subsidiary in China (that is in financial trouble) far exceeding demand (such that the expectation is that a significant share of the stock would need to be scrapped as it would not be able to be used in time)
Replacing 3 people with banking authority (including the CFO) with 3 other people, without financial background, one not an employee of Nexperia at all. All in the context where urgent US sanctions mean that independence from China is important for continued operations of the company. The court called this “Voor een onderneming van de orde van grootte van Nexperia grenst een dergelijke handelswijze aan roekeloosheid” (“For a company in the order of size of Nexerperia these actions border on being reckless”).
For the replacement no motivation was provided, prompting the chief financial officer and the chief legal officer from their own fiduciary duties as directors to object (and also to ask the court to investigate/intervene)
Stated intent to dismiss existing directors (without motivation) or asking for mandatory consultation from the workers council.
As to the decisions:
Suspension of Xuezheng as director/CEO
Temporary appointment of a new non-executive director (with power to make final decisions)
Place all (except 1) share under management/safekeeping with a lawyer
This all motivated by (very) signifcant breach of the fiduciary duty, not based upon an Dutch government action. The application of the Entity list on Nexperia as subsidiary was a significant contextual driver though (as in the duty to minimize corporate risks).
Anime activism – Matt Alt’s Pure Invention – I didn’t realise that in 1978 the president Marcos of the Philippines had banned a whole genre of anime (giant robots or mecha) due to the influence of Voltes V on Filipino student activists.
In the current climate of staff cuts, lingering threats of AI replacing the workforce and agencies dealing with economic constraints, late working – and the chance of burnout – continues to be a risk.
Shrinking teams can potentially lead to more demands being placed on remaining employees. WPP and Interpublic each cut thousands of staff from their global workforces in the first half of 2025, on top of headcount reductions in 2024. Last year, the collective global headcount across the “big six” holding companies declined by 1.6%, the first fall since the post-pandemic rebuild.
Spotify’s marketing team developed a creative production pipeline that could generate and deploy ad creatives to marketing channels based on listening habits in a geographic region. The problem they encountered was that they were generating creatives from a high-cardinality dataset, and the number of variations they were uploading to their channels was overwhelming those channels’ ability to optimize ads effectively.
Spotify’s solution was to build a pre-ranking algorithm using XGBoost that would determine which creatives to upload to the channels. Their ML pre-ranking model outperformed a simple heuristic model, with 4%-14% lower CPRs and 11%-12% higher CTRs. The ML model utilized a rich set of features to predict sub_percentage (the percentage of contributed subscriptions from the artist) and relative_cps_ratio (the share of the artist’s cost per subscription in the marketing campaign) for premium subscriptions, whereas the heuristic model used three fixed features. The model is retrained daily based on a defined lookback window.
Moreover, although this was deployed before ATT, the team found that ATT didn’t impact its performance, as training relied on aggregated data.
This obviously remains a relevant issue as advertisers scale the volume of their creative production through generative tools. While this pre-dates Meta’s Andromeda initiative for pre-ranking, it’s still likely relevant for most other channels (and, depending on the volume of creative uploaded, Meta).
Perplexity Pauses New Advertising Deals to Reassess Ambitions | AdWeek – brands are rethinking how to spend their budgets. Chan said many advertisers are moving away from performance-focused, traditional search and towards top-of-funnel brand awareness—an area Perplexity may pursue down the line.
Note: CIRP estimates the number of individual Amazon shoppers who use Amazon Prime. That includes multiple family members for many subscribers, so this estimate is higher than the number of US households that pay for an Amazon Prime membership.
Amazon knows the difference between Prime shoppers and paid Prime member households, so as US Prime membership approaches its limit, there may be a growing focus on bringing those numbers closer together. Amazon does not want to reduce the number of Amazon Prime membership users, but it certainly would not mind having more paid memberships associated with them. We expect Amazon to continue its efforts to attract members by emphasizing the benefits of Prime, rather than policing shopping and limiting Prime membership sharing.
CIRP estimates 200 million US Amazon customers had a Prime membership as of the September 2025 quarter. That is an increase of about 6% from 189 million US Amazon Prime members in the September 2024 quarter and up very slightly from our 198 million member estimate last quarter.
China bans tech companies from buying Nvidia’s AI chips | FT – the Nvidia ban is an interesting move by the Chinese government. I don’t think it’s just about putting pressure on their semiconductor companies and foundries. I think it also steers the software industry and approach to AI as well looking for more computationally efficient models. China can do comparable computes, using more lower spec chips and more power.
At the moment the leading edge models in the west are taking a hardware led approach rather like putting larger capacity engine in a car a la an old school hotrod. China is forcing its technology sector to take a more holistic approach.
Having Nvidia lobbying the US for permission to sell Blackwell in China is a secondary benefit and not the hard block people think it is. Compute jobs are already done abroad to get around the ban anyway. Its easy to move SSDs from China to Malaysia to run it on local data centres.
Can China really make its consumers spend? | Jing Daily – After decades of export success, country’s bet on domestic consumption to propel growth bumps up against beliefs about money and security. – They’ve got more chance of increasing the number of children born, the beliefs are that engrained
I love some of the apparently random things that Toyota under Akio Toyoda do. From the GR Yaris to this documentary on a vintage Komatsu steel press that was instrumental in Toyota’s first car factory and still is doing sterling work.
The dialogue is in Japanese but English subtitles are available.
September 2025 introduction – (26) pick-and-mix edition
Where has the year gone? I am just thankful that we got a little bit of sun, given how fast and hard the autumn wind and rain came in this year. I am now at issue 26, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘pick and mix’.
When I was a child ‘pick-and-mix’ sweets were a way of getting maximum variety for the lowest amount of pocket money that I earned from chores. Woolworths were famous at the time for their pick and mix section, alongside selling vinyl records and cassettes. Woolworths disappeared from the UK high street during the 2008 financial crisis.
For Mandarin Chinese speakers 26 is considered ‘lucky’ given that it sounds similar to ‘easy flow’ implying easy wealth.
This month’s soundtrack has been a banging digital compilation put together by Paradisco and Disco Isn’t Dead featuring The Reflex, PBR Streetgang, Prins Thomas, J Kriv, Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66.
Right, let’s get into it.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
A post that took me too long to write about the favourite campaigns I had when on the jury of the PHNX awards.
I missed sharing a post I wrote last month that built on the work of Rob Estreitinho on ideas for being a good strategist.
Books that I have read.
I finished Moscow X by David McCloskey. (No plot spoilers). This is the second book my McCloskey after Damascus Station, which I read and enjoyed back in May last year. The book is like a more action-orientated American version of a LeCarré novel. The plot reminded me of LeCarré’s Single & Single and Our Kind of Traitor. McCloskey isn’t afraid to have strong female lead characters in his book.
Your Life is Manufactured by Tim Minshall. Minshall is a professor at Cambridge and heads up the engineering department’s manufacturing research centre. Because of his mastery of the subject area, he manages to provide an exceptionally accessible primer in terms of what manufacturing is, how it happens and what it means. More about it here.
Things I have been inspired by.
Election-winning opacity in influencer relations
I have been following Taylor Lorenz‘ work since she became the beat reporter for online culture and technology at the Business Insider. Her article for Wired magazine on how the Democratic Party in the US is working with paid influencers makes for an interesting read.
What would be the norm in the commercial world about influencer transparency where there is a paid relationship – isn’t happening in politics.
Ok, why does this matter? The reason why I think this matters is that people who do their time in the trenches of a presidential election campaign have a clear path into a number of American agencies.
‘I’ve have won a victory for X candidate and can do the same for your brand’ has been a popular refrain for decades in agencies.
I have been in the room when senior American agency people have tried to convince Chinese companies to buy their services based on their success in marketing a candidate in an election using western social media channels. There was no sense of irony when this was awkwardly delivered as a possible solution for domestic market campaigns to marketing teams in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Shanghai.
Bad habits will be brought into agencies and sold on to clients.
Chart of the month.
Kim Malcolm shared a great report done by Zappi and VaynerMedia looking at The State of Creative Effectiveness 2025. Two charts piqued my interest. The change in distinctiveness of advertising by age cohort.
The overall emotion that an advert evokes by age cohort.
Causality of these effects aren’t clear. Empirically, I know that great adverts still put a smile on the faces of people of all ages and can change brand choice, even in the oldest consumers.
I had more questions than answers. VaynerMedia thought that the answer should be cohort-specific campaigns. I am less sure, since brands tend to better within culture as a common point of truth for everyone. Also, I don’t believe in leaping to a solution until I understand the underlying ‘problem’.
I could understand a decline in novelty as people gain decades of life experience and will have seen similar creative executions before.
Are the adverts lacking a foundation in strong cultural insights and cues that would resonate with these older audience cohorts?
What I did notice is a correlation with the age profile in advertising agency staff compared to the general public and the point at which the drop-off to occurs. But correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation.
It’s concerning that advertising effectiveness declines in older audience cohorts as economic power skews older within the general population. This is likely to continue as millennials inherit wealth from their baby boomer relatives as they enter their 50s and 60s. Which makes the old marketer line about half of a consumers economic value is over by 35 seem hollow.
Things I have watched.
Ghost In The Shell Arise: Border 1 and Border 2. In the GITS storyline this is a prequel to the original film. It follows how the eventual team comes together. The technology looks less fantastical and more prophetic each time I watch it. The animation is still spectacular.
Ghost In The Shell Arise: Border 3 and Border 4. Following on from Border 1 and Border 2, this has Togusa and the Section 9 team following the same case from different ends – which eventually has Togusa joining Section 9 as its only unaugmented team member.
I bought up as many of the films I could in Johnnie To’s filmography after he criticised Hong Kong’s national security regulation in an interview, which was likely to be the kiss of death to his film career. I finally got around to watching one of his best known films PTU and the series of Tactical Unit films that came from the same universe.
PTU: One of the paradoxes of Hong Kong is the prevalence of triad and corruption dramas, compared to the real life which whilst not crime and corruption free is much more staid. Hong Kong is as different from its cinematic counterpart, as the UK is to Richard Curtis’ films. PTU like Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog is based around the search for a missing police pistol. PTU (police tactical unit) officers look to help out a detective from the OCTB (organised crime and triad bureau). While the film occurs over one night, it was actually shot over three years and is one of Johnnie To’s best known films. Shooting only at night, To provided the audience with a familiar, yet different, cinematic experience. The washed out colours of day time Hong Kong is replaced by vibrant signage and the sharp shadows defined by the street lighting. Officers walking with a street lamp lit Tom Lee music instrument store behind them, look like its from a John Ford scene in composition. Some of his tracking shots, due to the framing of photography and the distortions of the night give an almost Inception like feeling to the geography of Hong Kong streets, warping the horizon between buildings the night sky. PTU was successful internationally and then spawned, five further films from the same universe made in 2008 and 2009.
Tactical Unit: The Code was a one of a series of Tactical Unit sequels to Johnnie To’s PTU. In The Code several plot lines come together. The investigation of CCTV footage of officers beating up a triad , a police officer heavily in debt due to negative equity on his mortgage and a drug deal gone wrong. All this plays out in the Kowloon area of Hong Kong. When this film was made back in 2008, it would have been considered well done, but largely unremarkable. Nowadays it couldn’t be made as it would in breach of the National Security Law. The irony is that this film is available on the iQiyi streaming service from mainland China.
Tactical Unit: Human Nature loses some of the cinematic feel of PTU. It’s not as masterful a film , BUT, the convoluted threads of the plot and the great cast who are now completely comfortable in their characters make it work well.
Tactical Unit: No Way Out. No Way Out starts with an impressive screne shot in Temple Street market. The film explores the Temple Street area of Kowloon and organised crime links to everything from cigarette smuggling to drugs.
Tactical Unit: Comrade in Arms is the penultimate in the series from the PTU universe of films. You still have the main cast of Hong Kong veterans Lam Suet, Simon Yam and Maggie Shiu. Plain clothes officer Lo Sa has been demoted to wearing a uniform and both Mike Ho and Sergeant Kat’s squads are still patrolling the Kowloon side of Victoria harbour. This sees the stars leave their usual urban beat and go into the hills of the New Territories after bank robbers. Much of it occurs in daylight, which sets it apart from the night time beat of PTU. Nowadays it couldn’t be made as it would in breach of the National Security Law. The irony is that this film is available on the iQiyi streaming service from mainland China.
Tactical Unit: Partners. Partners is unusual in that it revolves around the challenges of the ethnic minorities that make up Hong Kong from romance fraud ensnaring filipina workers to discrimination against Indians and Nepalis. While some of the show happens during late on in the day, it still captures much of the night time feeling of the universe
2001 Nightsis a 3D anime. While I admire the ambition and the technical expertise that went into the models, the characters as CGI fall down and distract from the storytelling. Also it felt weirdly like Space 1999 – and not in a good way.
Her Vengeance is a Hong Kong category III revenge movie filmed in 1988 that 88 Films recently release on Blu Ray. It borrows from another Hong Kong film in the early 1970s and I Spit On Your Grave. Despite being an low budget exploitation film it features a number of notable Hong Kong actors, probably because it was a Golden Harvest Production.
I found the film interesting because its opening was shot at Stanley Ho’s iconic Casino Lisboa in Macau. This was unusual because Hong Kong had lots of nightclubs that would have been fine for the protagonists management role without the hassle of the additional travel and government permissions. So we get a rare late 1980s snapshot of the then Portuguese colony.
When The Last Sword Is Drawnis a classic chambara (samurai sword-play) movie. It tells the complex story of a samurai, who unable to support his family on his meagre income as a school teacher and fencing master, turns his back on his clan and leaves to find work in Kyoto. Once in Kyoto he becomes embroiled in the battle between the declining Takagawa Shogunate and the Imperial Royal Family during the 19th century. Whilst the film does contain a lot of violence, it is used as a backdrop to the humanity of the main character and battles he faces between providing for his family and doing the honourable thing.
The plot is told through the recollections of others and finishes with the samurai’s youngest daughter getting ready to leave Japan with her husband and set up a doctor’s surgery in Manchuria (China).
Useful tools.
Playing Blu-Ray discs on a Mac
I have a Blu Ray player in my home theatre that enjoy using in lieu of subscribing to Netflix, which allows to me to explore more art house content than I can stream. Macgo Mac Blu Ray Player Pro gives your Mac the software capability that Steve Jobs wouldn’t.
One final thing, if you prefer to use Substack, you can now subscribe to this newsletter there.
The sales pitch.
I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency. I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from the start of 2026 – keep me in mind; or get in touch for discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
Ok this is the end of my September 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and get planning for Hallowe’en.
Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.
Along with immigration, and economic measures (like inflation, interest rates and possible growth); crime is likely to decide the next general election in the UK. The issue and the supporting data around it are complex and sometimes contradictory in nature.
It sits right on the fault line between social democrat and populist narratives to voters.
Crime is a hardy perennial of policy subjects
Labour’s political golden age of the late 20th century harked back to the transformation of the party that claimed to be ‘Touch on crime, tough on the causes of crime‘. While the phrase was popularised by Tony Blair at the 1993 Labour Party conference – it owes its roots to the opposition team assembled under former Labour leader John Smith.
The phrase captured Labour’s attempt to steal the Conservative position on law and order, combining it with a preventative approach to the social ills that drive the issue including homelessness and poverty.
Two decades later and David Cameron’s ‘Broken Britain’ depicted a country awash in social decay and by implication criminal behaviour.
So it’s natural, that during a time of social disruption and stubbornly stagnant economic growth that crime will be used as a political differentiator.
It fits into a wider perception of the UK being a country in decline. This perception was found by Ipsos to be one of the key drivers of political populism.
Ipsos also found that the perception of crime and violence being the number one issue rose from 18% of respondents to 23% from 2023 to 2024.
Crime is falling?
The statistical picture on crime is complicated. To summarise:
Overall reported crime numbers are down. However, trying to get police to log a reported crime is much harder in previous times.
The ‘decline’ in reported crimes across different types of offences is very uneven. Data from the UN Office of Crime and Drugs found that the UK had seen an unprecedented increase in the rate of serious assaults from 2012 – 2022.
As the FT put it:
“street crime” has risen rapidly. Over the past decade, reported shoplifting has risen by over 50 per cent, robberies (including phone and car theft) by over 60 per cent and knife crime by almost 90 per cent. Public order offences have almost trebled
The police have become less effective crime fighters. Although police have less reported crimes to solve, less than six percent of crimes in committed in the UK resulted in a charge or summons in 2023. That compares to just under 16 percent in 2015. The UK government’s focus on increasing mass surveillance powers won’t solve the crisis in crime fighting. An example of the problems that the police face and failed to solve presented itself at the time of writing. There was a spate of phone thefts at the Creamfields festival. All the phones ended up at the same address in Barking. Cheshire police told those affected that:
“We have undertaken an assessment of your crime and unfortunately based on the information currently available, it is unlikely we’ll be able to solve your crime”.
Cheshire Police said that they couldn’t recover their devices despite knowing where they are.
Cheshire Police do not believe the thefts are connected to organised crime. Yet dozens of phones showed up at the same address after they were stolen…
Trust in the public for the police to solve crime is declining. Policing by consent was no longer happening in many areas of the UK. Issues like ‘Asian grooming gangs’ in The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse indicated poliicing issues in recommendations to pay attention to vulnerable working-class children and their families when they come forward. Two-tier policing is more likely to run along class lines than political lines.
While crime still lags behind the economy and health as concerns for voters. The percentage of respondents who felt that stopping or preventing crime should be the number one priority for politicians went from 14% in 2023 to 23% in 2024.
While Britain needs foreign direct investment, crime is adversely affecting efforts to attract investors. Foreign business people are complaining to senior politicians they meet about British street crime they’ve experienced on visits. The UK now has a global reputation for violent robberies. 40 percent of all phone thefts in Europe happen in the UK. London alone accounts for 16 percent of all phone thefts across Europe.
Crime across generations
According to both Ipsos and the National Centre for Social Research, the current cohort of young adults stick out with regards their beliefs and attitudes towards crime:
An increased belief that crime is caused by a lack of education
An increased openness to committing crime, particularly fraud.
Opposition to current frameworks for punishment.
All of which is at odds with the fact that much crime is organised, trans-national and violent in nature.
