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.

  • Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert M Cialdini

    Cialdini’s Influence is now over ten years old and still stands up. It is a good guide on the psychology of why people say “yes”. The accessible style of Influence reminded of Douglas Rushcoff, or Malcolm Gladwell. Ok Malcolm Gladwell is a poor analogy, Cialdini’s work isn’t candy floss for the mind. This is deceptive as there is usually an inverse relationship between value and accessibility. Exceptions to this heuristic would be the likes of Sun Tzu – The Art of War.

    Influence by Cialdini

    Cialdini hasn’t been researched within an inch of its life in the same way Byron Sharp’s books have been.

    Cialdini provides planners and strategists with starting points for customer experiences. The book isn’t a how to guide for digital journeys but provides first principles. Psychology is not channel-specific.

    The Journal of Marketing Research described it as

    …among the most important books written in the last 10 years.

    The book’s style allowed me to pick it up and put it down, to fit in with my holiday schedule of train travel and family time.

    Why should you have Cialdini’s Influence?

    • If your work includes marketing planning or strategy, your bookshelf should have this book. If you are thinking about customer interactions, this book outlines the first principles that you need
    • If you’re a consumer and want to know how you’re being sold to; read this book
    • If you want to get on better with people ( your kids or co-workers); buy this book

    My copy is well-thumbed and stuffed with post-it notes around the edges as I go back and forth into it on a regular basis. More marketing related content here.

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  • Belkin buyout + more news

    The Curious Case of the Belkin Buy – Om Malik – not really so curious. It makes sense for Belkin and Foxconn. Belkin and Foxconn can use the advantages that they have in terms of production and understanding of Apple products to get ahead. Having a recognisable brand in Belkin that gives Foxconn better margin in the home. More related content here. 

    China gives preliminary green light for two largest shipbuilders to merge | SCMP – makes sense given the current over supply of ships and bankruptcy of ship owners like Hanjin in Korea

    Top Facebook Executive Defended Data Collection In 2016 Memo — And Warned That Facebook Could Get People Killed – The best products don’t win. The ones everyone use win – unsurprisingly the guy who wrote the memo was an ex-Microsoft executive who had been there during Gates and Ballmer

    Telenor sells off Eastern European assets to refocus on Asia | total telecom – interesting move, they seem to think that the belt and road initiative won’t benefit them as it moves through Eastern and Central Europe. Disclosure, I worked on Telenor Myanmar.

    Standard Chartered joins TBWA in crowdsourcing platform launch | Advertising | Campaign Asia – Only really works if there are producers looking to enter an industry that is worthwhile getting into

    Facebook locks out third-party data providers | Digital | Campaign Asia – GDPR related and the official notice: Shutting Down Partner Categories | Facebook Newsroom

    ‘Print is dead’ – then why do even the tech giants use it for their apology ads? | The Drum

    Teenagers Say JUUL Is A Discreet Way To Vape In Class : Shots – Health News : NPR – great if unintentional brand building

    Trump hates Amazon, not Facebook – Axios – and I can understand why

    Clark gives Melrose extra firepower in battle for GKN | Business | The Times  – Oddly, almost as important a deal — the £24 billion takeover of Arm Holdings by Softbank, of Japan — slipped through the net. Hatched in the chaotic days after the Brexit referendum, ministers hailed the deal as a triumph of Britain still being open for business, when for the technology community it was one of its greatest setbacks.

    Take a look at these two versions of a Guardian article: The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked | Technology | The Guardian and The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked | Technology | The Guardian. Which makes me wonder about the veracity of the journalism. Why the edits? Was it that it couldn’t be verified, didn’t fit the story the Guardian wanted to portray or something else? More questions than answers.

  • Reid Hoffman on tech sector issues

    This Reid Hoffman video stands in sharp comparison to the Ayn Rand-loving frat-bro culture that seems to infect technology  sector companies based in Silicon Valley. However Hoffman in his past has reflected at least some of their libertarian views.

    However Reid Hoffman is cut from different cloth and represents a slightly older generation in the technology sector who pioneered the dot.com era.

    He grew up in Berkeley, back when the technology sector was more hardware focused and Silicon Valley actually made micro-chips. Back then HP (now Agilent) and Techtronix made measurement equipment in the Valley and it was the centre of the cold war missile technology. The east coast from IBM in New York State to the Boston corridor represented a worthy adversary of Silicon Valley. The technology sector only opted to have Silicon Valley as its home during the move to personal computing.

    eWorld

    Hoffman worked at Apple on eWorld – an early way of connecting Macs to the nascent public internet. There was interesting ideas that came out of that at the time including work on object orientated programming. Apple later abandoned eWorld when they saw the ‘net taking off and instead collaborated with selected ISPs like ClaraNet and Demon in the UK.

    Reid Hoffman later founded a prototype-social network and was part of the PayPal mafia before founding LinkedIn. The irony is that the PayPal mafia were ground zero for the current generation of technology company CEOs.

    Reid Hoffman offers a more thoughtful considered viewpoint on the future of the technology sector.

    How Technology is Shaping the Future of Human Society was filmed by the Aspen Institute.

  • Join hands on apps + more news

    China smartphone makers join hands on apps, pose threat to WeChat | Reuters – this effort by vendors to join hands on apps reminds me of work that Google did on ‘streaming’ apps as needed that went a bit quiet. Interesting that the manufacturers are willing to go against Tencent. In a mature market handset providers want a bite of services, but is there an advantage with brands to throw in with one or more of the handset eco-systems given their disparate app stores?

    Americans less likely to trust Facebook than rivals on personal data: Reuters/Ipsos poll – trust and leaving the platform are two different things. What was surprising is how low a rating Apple had compared to its tech peers given its efforts in privacy protection by design. Facebook starts looking looking like Microsoft did as a brand

    South Korea fines Facebook $369K for slowing user internet connections – The Verge – why was Facebook ‘trumpeting’ their traffic about the place? This is really odd, almost like there was ‘man in the middle’ inspection of data going on. The fine Facebook faces represents about 0.05% of Facebook’s Korean revenue for a year

    Having Your Smartphone Nearby Takes a Toll on Your Thinking (Even When It’s Silent and Facedown) – interesting research. Think of the relationship as similar to Gollum and the one ring

    Yahoo Japan Plans To Launch Cryptocurrency Exchange Amid FSA Crackdown | ZeroHedge – interesting move by SoftBank. Yahoo! Japan brand is a strategic asset, yet Son-san is willing to risk it on cryptocurrency which I perceive to be a tactical play. I can’t see continued interest in consumer speculation on it in the longer term. More related content here

    Dennis Yu on the Facebook debacle – Dennis is the chief technology officer Facebook marketing business called BlitzMetrics. If anyone knows their stuff its likely to be him

  • Technology uncanny valley of the web

    The technology sector is in a maelstrom.

    Strange Magicks

    Cambridge Analytica

    Whilst Cambridge Analytica surprised most people in digital marketing who get the technology. The claims surprised for three main reasons:

    • Facebook’s scope of data access wasn’t surprising to marketers, but the level of shock the media felt was seismic
    • Cambridge Analytica was considered to have some mythical secret sauce by the media. Those marketers close to the political scene were surprised. How was Cambridge Analytica thought effective?
    • The media have avoided discussing the advertising technology that underpins modern online media. This creates richer data profiles and improves media targeting. Unfortunately this technology runs on their website, analysing their traffic, vending their advertising
    ‘Supernatural’ technology

    I caught up with a friend who had recently upgraded the operating system on their Mac laptop and iPhone. They made a restaurant booking and were surprised when the web site ‘knew who they were’. and automatically completed their information. Then, on the day of the booking a notification popped up. It said that they should leave now as there was moderate traffic.

    They ascribed all this magic to the the website ‘knowing’ everything about them. I explained to them that this was their Apple products trying to be helpful rather than dialing their anxiety levels to 11.

    People are powerless

    There is an assumption amongst the general public that technology has supernatural powers.

    It makes them uncomfortable, but they feel powerless in the face of it. This discomfort reminded me of the ‘uncanny valley’ experienced with humanoid robots. For the rest of consumer there is latent inertia. They will generally put up with a lot of discomfort.

    They realise at a base level that The Technium is – . They don’t realise how they should adapt to it.

    The technium is a superorganism of technology. It has its own force that it exerts. That force is part cultural (influenced by and influencing of humans), but it’s also partly non-human, partly indigenous to the physics of technology itself.

    It’s just the way things are. Consumer actions won’t make a difference. #deletefacebook will barely make a dent and that’s what’s scariest of all. More related issues here.

    More information

    The Technium and the 7th kingdom of life | Edge.org

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