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.

  • Citizen M Hotel & other things this week

    Citizen M Hotel

    I had some meetings and discovered what a good meeting space the lobby of the Citizen M Hotel in Bankside is. The downside I managed to lose my favourite pen, that was my fault; not the hotel. Of course, that didn’t take the sting out of it.

    The Citizen M Hotel lobby area is part lobby, part co-working space that feels airy, but with some privacy, which makes it ideal for the kind of discussions that I was having at the time. It’s comfortable, but not opulent or luxurious by any stretch of the imagination.

    Eames lounger

    My dream chair is an Eames lounger and I am fascinated by production processes. This video from fulfils both admirably; showing how the Eames chair is made. A few things struck me abut the manufacturing process:

    • The dynamic nature of curved plywood, that is used in ways that plastics might be used now for structural strength, for instance in the Aeron chair that I am currently sat in.
    • The user serviceability of the product item, making it relatively easy to repair for a user or a professional with the right tools and parts.
    • In the same way that we’ve been divorced from how our food is grown, globalisation has divorced us from how things are made. This is particularly true in a de-industrialised country like the UK

    Jeremy Healy

    This week, I went back, way back, back into time and ended up listening to this mix of Jeremy Healy at Hot To Trot. What gets me about this is diversity of the set. The slight crunchiness in the beat mixing early on adds to its charm. Now of course, these sets would be laid out in Digidesign allowing for a seamless flow. More culture related content here.

    Chinese privacy

    This Chinese made video on privacy has more than an element of truth beneath the humour. It would give Black Mirror a good run for its money.

    Global digital snapshot

    Last thought… 2018 Q2 Global Digital Statshot by wearesocial

  • Coldcut + more things

    CLOT Magazine | COLDCUT, a journey through cut and paste and audiovisual innovation – great overview of Coldcult creative efforts and an interview with the group. Coldcut started off as DJ / producers and along the way evolved into multimedia artists as well. Along the way Coldcut founded the Ninja Tunes record label, and in Hex helped push forward multimedia just before the web came along.

    Flickr Takes Another Sad Turn, Gets Bought by Something Called SmugMug | Gizmodo – I am thankful that flickr hasn’t been shut down but pensive over what the plan SmugMug has. The sale of flickr means that I am pretty much done as an Oath customer then with the exception of Yahoo! Finance news content. More flickr related content here.

    Do Chinese Luxury Consumers Care About British Heritage? | Jing Daily – In the West, we buy into lifestyle brands—we like brands that can sell us everything. But the Chinese consumer likes to go to a specialist for each item. They like to buy their knitwear from one place and their shoes from another. They value quality and are willing to pay for it. – which is where premium streetwear gets in the door

    Facebook – Bipedal voting | Radio Free Mobile – interesting analysis

    EX-99.1 Amazon letter to shareholders – quite a scary document via our Matt

    Agency Layoffs Or Agency Calibration? | Forrester Research – examine the characteristics of the players winning creative assignments for digital experiences. Tech consultancies like Accenture Interactive, Deloitte Digital, IBMiX and PwC are successful with system integration and digital experiences. Their combination of data, strategy, implementation and creative is a potent offering for marketers. Yet, their ability to capture the essence of the brand is still developing. For agencies – large or small, public or independent – brand creativity is differentiating

    A Renewed Vision For WPP | Forrester Research – I don’t think that a technology leader would get creative businesses and you’d end up with yet another ad tech business with the rest of the value withering away but interesting reading

    The Battle for the Gayborhood Has Become A Passive-Aggressive Turf War – I was reading this and thinking about the way Canal Street in Manchester became invaded by hen parties from across the UK from the late 1990s onwards

  • Voice activated coupon + more news

    Voice activated coupon

    Google’s First Voice Activated Coupon – WPP – Google distributed its first voice-activated coupon offering customers $15 off Target purchases placed on Google Express through Google Assistant –through desktop, mobile or Google Assistant enabled devices – I am surprised that Amazon didn’t introduce the voice activated coupon before Google.

    Beauty

    SK-II finds success in selling to younger Chinese: P&G | Advertising | Campaign Asia – luxury brand with an on ramp for college students

    China

    China Bans Online Bible Sales as It Tightens Religious Controls – The New York Times – I am concerned about Vatican appeasement of China. It looks like Neville Chamberlain

    Consumer behaviour

    Headline from China: Purchase Restriction and Red Streetwear | Jing Daily – interesting how streetwear brands are being cleared out of the way by the Chinese government to support Chinese originated brands

    How Americans Self-Sort Themselves by Age and Class – CityLab

    Culture

    The Overwhelming Emotion of Hearing Toto’s “Africa” Remixed to Sound Like It’s Playing in an Empty Mall | The New Yorker

    Molly Ringwald Revisits “The Breakfast Club” in the Age of #MeToo | The New Yorker – good read, what I remember is how those films nailed emotion

    Japan

    Japan to place accident liability on self-driving car owners – Nikkei Asian Review – makers liable only in case of a system flaw

    Online

    China’s Didi Chuxing prepares to launch Mexico operations | HKEJ Insights – China going global

    RSS is undead | Techcrunch – no RSS is alive, but Techcrunch haven’t worked out issues the RSS users have already. Much of the issues are solved by using NewsBlur and finding sources is organic rather than an instant end state. More online related topics here.

    Security

    Could Cambridge Analytica boss be probed for Philippine meddling? | SCMP  – This could get interesting. Putting aside arguments about whether Cambridge Analytica’s technology actually works as promised, Philippines law would still have been broken. It forbids all outside parties from participating in its election process.It is alleged that they were supporting Duterte, which would make the foreign reaction to it interesting as well.

    Technology

    ARM Mac: Piece of Cake Or Gas Refinery? – Monday Note – assumes that there will be a transition, which I am not convinced about

    API and Other Platform Product Changes – Facebook for Developers – reduces information that can be taken out to beef up privacy

    Wireless

    Smartphone shipments fall again in Q1 | Shanghai Daily – China looks saturated in terms of smartphones

    Cell Spotting: Studying the Role of Cellular Networks in the Internet by Rula, Bustamante and Steiner – (PDF)

  • Global Web Index + more news

    Global Web Index data on privacy

    1 in 4 Deeply Concerned About Online Privacy – GlobalWebIndex Blog – ok its Global Web Index so you have to take the data with a pinch of salt. Global Web Index is based on people completing online surveys. That means that the technique Global Web Index uses needs to be considered alongside the data. It isn’t observed behaviour, but reported behaviour. One might do one thing and say another. The extremely high rate of concern in Latin America in the Global Web Index survey could be a sampling error on the survey or it could be quite profound given that it would be a growth market for social media networks like Facebook

    Business

    WPP Appoints Independent Counsel to Investigate Allegations of ‘Personal Misconduct’ Against CEO Martin Sorrell – Adweek – by the sounds of it the share price drop was disproportionate to the size of misuse involved

    Marketing

    ANA finds only 36% of marketers say their influencer marketing is effective | The Drum – research says what people know but won’t talk about

    Not a simple process’: Marketers struggle to recruit in-house media talent – Digiday – what’s depressing about this is not the media side of things but is how screwed brand is with in-house marketers

    Media

    YouTube will now monetize on skipped ads | Digital | Campaign Asia – interesting how a brand marketing metric (CPM) is recharacterised as a ‘vanity measure’

    Online

    The death of the newsfeed — Benedict Evans – or why western social platforms may learn from WeChat’s user experience

    OPPO Digital – giving up making hi-fi and high end Blu-Ray players – a bit sad as OPPO made high-end headphones and arguably the best multi-region Blu-Ray players that money could buy

    Security

    Privacy fears over police spy tools that can break into mobile phones | News | The Times – The technology was first introduced by the Metropolitan Police for the London Olympics in 2012 and has been quietly rolled out. Privacy International’s report says police are operating without any clear legal framework and often break into phones belonging to people who have not been convicted of any crime, including witnesses and victims

    Technology

    Let’s take a moment to appreciate all the lies in Zuckerberg’s truths about Tim Cook and Apple – BGR – interesting tonality in this article which gives you an idea of the temperament vintage Microsoft enjoyed in the technology media. Expect Facebook to start emphasising their innovative nature soon…

    We put Huawei’s P20 triple-lens snapper through its paces • The Register – basically keep your old phone and download VSCO. Interesting a wider phone review wasn’t done. Says a lot about market saturation and performance differences per handset generation. More related content here.

  • Family & other things that made my day this week

    Untitled

    I spent a good deal of the week seeing the family. It was great to have homemade soda bread and finish off my Mum’s Christmas cake. Yes, you haven’t read that wrong, my Mum specialises in making rich fruit cakes for Christmas. They keep for a good few months afterwards.

    A good deal of that was spent watching Homeland and assorted  films with my Dad. This included Accident Man – a pretty accurate remake of the Toxic! comic book character from the early 1990s by Pat Mills (of 2000AD fame) and Tony Skinner. We didn’t watch them as a family for reasons that will become apparent.

    For a brief period from March to October 1991; the UK comic scene had a darker, more anarchic publication than had been previously seen. Toxic! was originally designed to address failings in 2000AD magazine.

    The film is so anachronistic in its nature that its audience will be niche. That doesn’t reflect on the quality of the action in the film. It features Ray Stevenson, Scott Adkins (you’d recognise hime host of Hong Kong and Hollywood movies) and Ray Park (who played Darth Maul). Adkins is a bit lean to play the titular character Mick Fallon, which is a surprise given his Boyka role in the Undisputed franchise. Adkins to his credit manages to make it all work.

    Both the director and the script writer managed to skilfully blend the unreconstructed misogyny of 1991 with with the great ‘unawoke’ attitudes of a post-Brexit Britain.

    Watching Wanted: Dead or Alive with Rutger Hauer shows how much the media portrayal of Islamic terrorism has changed over the past 30 years. The plot itself is a bit odd. Sex tape star Gene Simmons plays an Islamic terrorist looking to cause a Bhopal-type disaster as an act of revenge on the United States – where do you even start with that plot?

    Hauer’s car has an early generation cellular phone and what seems like some sort of satellite navigation equipment with a monochrome CRT display.

    Dated films weren’t the only things that I saw. The family car is still a Polo diesel that I helped them buy. Whilst I heard of a few people who had a Nissan Leaf; Merseyside is still firmly in the petroleum age. Most of the cars were a decade old on average and I didn’t see any obvious charging stations. Importation of secondhand cars from Japan is still a thing. Both J60 and J80 series Toyota Land Cruisers seem to have a loyal following.

    For something more recent and music-related, I can recommend this from Resident Advisor: How did UK garage become dubstep?

    I think that we must be pretty close to peak-vape. I was in a Wilkinsons store and wandered past the cough and cold medicine section. Wilkinsons is a discount retailer that does a mix of food cupboard staple grocers, household cleaning products and over the counter pharmacy products. A good analogue for Hong Kong readers would be 759 Store.

    On the top shelf of the unit above cough and cold remedies was vape fluid and e-cigarettes.

    Douglas Rushkoff | Present Shock Economies – great YouTube video which explains why Amazon is likely to be more trouble over time than Facebook ever will be. Well worth listening to during a lunch hour.

    Finally Asian Boss had some great vox pop interviews with Beijingers about what they thought of Sesame Credit which is a financial and behavioural credit system being rolled out in China.