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.

  • Temasek + other news

    Temasek takes risky leap

    Magic Leap Raises $502 Million, Led by Singapore’s Temasek – Bloomberg – this seems insane. Temasek is Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund. It has holdings in DBS Bank, Singapore Airlines, Singtel and Mediacorp. Temasek grew a thousand fold during its five decades of existence. All of which makes the Temasek bet on Magic Leap seem even more odd. More related content here.

    Business

    WSJ City | A $20 billion startup fuelled by Silicon Valley pixie dust – yep WeWork

    In Europe’s digital race, the winner is the United States – POLITICO – this analysis largely rings true

    Consumer behaviour

    Millennials are no harder to manage than Generation X, according to the commentary of the 1990s — Quartz at Work – basically youth is youth is youth

    Brexit – a cry of financial pain, not the influence of the old | VOX, CEPR’s Policy Portal – unhappy feelings contributed to Brexit.  However, contrary to commonly heard views, the key channel of influence was not through general dissatisfaction with life;  it was through a person’s narrow feelings about his or her own financial situation. There has been a correlation between leave vote areas and rising hate crime

    Culture

    Thinking about working for a Chinese company? First, find out if it’s a ‘Lenovo’ or a ‘Huawei.’ – SupChina  – With Huawei, all business seems to orbit around the company’s central headquarters in Shenzhen, and for the company’s overseas business, it relies on sending employees abroad on a massive scale. It is notoriously untrusting of local staff. “If someone works at Huawei and they are not Chinese, regardless of their title or salary, I guarantee you, they have very little real power or authority, even if they are based in their home country,” said a former Huawei employee. Another former Huawei employee told me, “When we’d work overseas, the Chinese staff would discuss an issue privately, and then agree on how we would communicate that issue to the local staff. Often the message we would give the local staff was very different from the reality of the situation.”

    Another industry expert said bluntly about Huawei, “I cannot think of another company in the world that has such a global presence, but pays so little attention to localization and integration.” – This had been doing the social rounds with former colleagues who had worked on the Huawei business, offered here without comment…

    Ethics

    Too many firms claim social goals they can’t possibly realise | The Australian – what happens when advertising does corporate communications and CSR

    Finance

    How a Messaging App Challenged Traditional Banks and Captured 45% of the Market – Counterpoint Research – interesting case study. The penetration of KakaoTalk in Korea is almost total

    The Transaction Costs of Tokenizing Everything | Elaine’s Idle Mind – this will give me unpleasant flashbacks from launching Enron’s broadband market internationally

    FMCG

    In 1973, I invented a ‘girly drink’ called Baileys – I looked down at the paper and there was an article about a golf tournament. The Open was being played at Royal Lytham. The headline mentioned R&A, golf’s governing body, and I instantly blurted “How about two initials? How do you like the sound of R&A Bailey? Think golf and the R&A.” “Great” he said, “I love it.” And that was that and I went back to reading the paper.

    Marketing

    Space: Marketing’s Final Frontier | Agency News – AdAge – 38% of Americans surveyed would be more likely to buy a product if its development was associated with space exploration

    Lee Child, British Crime Thriller Author – Xerox – really nice project by Xerox

    KLM first airline with verified WhatsApp business account – from September but still interesting

    Online

    Twitter is working on a feature that lets you save tweets for later | Digital Trends – this is kind of the way I used favourites on Twitter

    Retailing

    The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare | Fast Company – interesting cliquey environment

    Security

    Dodging Russian Spies, Customers Are Ripping Out Kaspersky | Daily Beast – not that much sourcing on this, but worry nonetheless

    Ad Industry Insiders Profited From An Ad Fraud Scheme That Researchers Say Stole Millions Of Dollars – interesting if what it alleges is true – the outcome will be interesting

    Software

    Google’s Learning Software Learns to Write Learning Software | WIRED – software writing other software

    Web of no web

    Apple Watch Hits Cellular Snag in China – WSJ – also allows domestic wearable vendors to catch up

    Samsung’s 360 Round camera livestreams 3D VR | Engadget – interesting focus on streaming

    Microsoft may soon launch its answer to the Amazon Echo – Business Insider – interesting statistics on relative performance of machine learning platforms

    Home – Voice Originals – interesting integration with Alexa

    Wireless

    ZTE Axon M dual-screen phone first look – YouTube – interesting development in smartphone product design

    Huawei and LinkedIn: A new way to power your professional relationships | Official LinkedIn Blog – I wonder how this fits with the Google licensing on Android?

  • Thelonius Monk + other things

    Thelonius Monk

    The soundtrack to my week was this three hour programme on the music of jazz musician Thelonius Monk. Thelonius Monk has 99 albums to his name, excluding compilations, many of which were live concert performances rather than studio recordings. He was known for his improvisation and was one of the found fathers of bebop.

    KCRW put together a great tribute to Thelonius Monk that hits all of the high spots that I know of in his career, that was cut short at the age of 64 in 1982.

    Sailor Moon + syphilis – two concepts I never thought I would utter in the same sentence

    Only Japan could successfully leverage a much loved children’s TV and comic book character to try and reduce syphilis infections. It was interesting to hear that the creator of Sailor Moon was a pharmacist who saw the urgency and need. Quartz alludes to Shinjuku – the entertainment district being the epicentre. Japan like its neighbours has seen an increase in foreign sex tourism from other Asian markets.

    This is solely down to a larger Chinese middle class who visit prostitutes for bonding business relationships (sharing knowledge of each others transgressions builds trust). There is also macho posturing to reinforce hierarchies and subjugate the sex workers. They also go for pleasure when they’re on holiday. Basically, they’re absolute scum.

    Japanese hi-fi enthusiasts

    Great short film by the Wall Street Journal about obsessive Japanese Hi-Fi buffs. I love the extremes that they go to in order to get the best sounds.

    Uniqlo Danpan

    A Uniqlo campaign is always something that I look forward to and Uniqlo Danpan is no exception

    Volkswagen

    Interesting effort to move the discussion on around the Volkswagen brand from Dieselgate. The reality is that Dieselgate will be with us for years as it rolls through court cases and is cited with regards the need for electric cars.

  • Grenadier car project + other news

    Grenadier

    Ineos Projekt Grenadier: an old-school 4×4 off-roader for 2020 by CAR Magazine – interesting that they think there is a gap here. Chemical conglomerate Ineos, have the money to pull the Grenadier off.

    Grenadier market?

    The larger question is around whether there is a market for the Grenadier? While we think of Land Cruisers as luxury vehicles, you can still get a barebones one in markets like Australia, the Middle East and Africa. Mercedes still does a bare bones G-Wagen.

    Grenadier costs

    A mass production assembly line for the Grenadier including tooling would cost about £100 million or so, based on previous refits I have seen done at the Vauxhall car plant in Ellesmere Port.

    That wouldn’t include an engine foundry. I would expect Grenadier to raid the parts bins of other manufacturers for things like engines. They will buy off the shelf transmissions from the likes of ZF or Magna PT, if they can’t raid a parts bin. The problem with raiding parts bins is that you are using products that are designed to be digitally integrated together now. Would companies like VDO be able to provide you with analogue instruments? Most modern cars aren’t unreliable because of cabin electronics, the problems are usually the underlying mechanics and control systems. Those electronics are put there to get the vehicles to ‘limbo’ under the tightening environmental standards and Grenadier will be no exception.

    Overall development of the Grenadier may cost multiples of the price of the production line, including type approval across markets.

    Business

    Publicis and WPP are takeover targets and Accenture ‘looks a credible buyer’, bank says – interesting hypothesis

    T-Mobile and Sprint are in active talks about a merger | CNBC – Son-san and Legere could be an interesting and complementary mix

    Consumer behaviour

    Under The Surface: The Why of Chinese Consumer Behaviour | Holmes Report  – with a billion people and a fast-growing economy, those feelings of uncertainty are even more profound and widespread.   The true meaning of technology for Chinese users? The ability to feel in control in an era of anxiety.

    Douglas Todd: Men do well in science and tech, but lag elsewhere | Montreal Gazette – the real reason more males complete STEM degrees, says Tabarrok, of George Mason University, is that, to put it too bluntly, “the only men who are good enough to get into university are men who are good at STEM. Women are good enough to go into non-STEM and STEM fields.”

    The findings of Card, of the University of California, Berkeley, and Payne, of McMaster University, are consistent with wider concerns about the under-representation of men in higher education and in many sectors of the labour market, says Tabarrok.

    “If we accept the results (of Card and Payne), the gender-industry gap is focused on the wrong thing. The real gender gap is that men are having trouble competing everywhere except in STEM,” says Tabarrok – the big question is the why? It also makes one wonder if the narrative of privilege has gone into reverse for some reason?

    Economics

    Sustainable development: China’s path out of poverty can never be repeated at scale by a country again — Quartz – interesting read. It puts the internet into perspective, shipping containers had more impact in China’s economic rise

    Ethics

    Idle Words | Anatomy of a moral panic – worthwhile reading as it illustrates the current poor state of news reporting

    Ideas

    Blade Runner 2049_: Inside the Dark Future of a Sequel 35 Years in the Making | WIRED – “Blade Runner changed the way the world looks and how we look at the world,” William Gibson says. It was one of the things which inspired me to move to Hong Kong

    Innovation

    Really interesting hologram imagery created using the persistence of vision effect

    Here’s another example of it from a Chinese company in Shenzhen thanks to Naomi Wu for the video. According to Naomi this is a Rainbo device.

    Media

    ​Facebook: news a pagamento entro il 2017, anche in Italia – Rai News – Facebook to trial paywalled content

    China’s Booming Live Streaming Market Has Reached Its Zenith – Huajiao. Long answer: emoji-like “gifts” from the viewers that can later be cashed in for money. Chinese viewers are less enamored by mindlessly goofy check out my six pack vids (*cough* Logan Paul), and more interested in watching the mundanities of their favorite influencer’s everyday life — i.e. singing in the shower, driving, and… slurping soup? – There is a clear line between this and things like Korean ‘eating’ videos.

    Influencer Marketing Effectiveness is Limited by Management! | PARKLU – not only China!

    Uber Sues Mobile Agency Alleging Ad Fraud – WSJ – interesting implications around tracking showing weakness in Uber’s much vaunted data expertise?

    Should Social Go Local? | The Daily | L2 – some nice assets

    Online

    Twitter to test longer tweets – but only for European languages – Mumbrella Asia – to be honest it makes sense for languages like German and Finnish

    The New York Times on Facebook

    The First Web Apps: 5 Apps That Shaped the Internet as We Know It | Zapier blog – great lunch time read

    Security

    DuckDuckGo: The Solopreneur That Is Beating Google at Its Game – The Four-Week MBA

    Signal Has a Fix for Apps’ Contact-Leaking Problem | WIRED – I so hope they sort it

    Distrustful U.S. allies force spy agency to back down in encryption fight  – academic and industry experts from countries including Germany, Japan and Israel worried that the U.S. electronic spy agency was pushing the new techniques not because they were good encryption tools, but because it knew how to break them.

    The NSA has had to drop all but the most powerful versions of the techniques – those least likely to be vulnerable to possible hacks by the NSA

    Technology

    Unilever finds startups can replace some agency tasks – Digiday – marketing automation gone mad

  • Machine learning sublime influence

    Scott Galloway talks about the way brands are using AI (machine learning) and the examples are very much in the background.  Welcome to the sublime world of machine learning where the impact on the customer experience won’t be apparent. In many respects this is similar to how fuzzy logic became invisible as it was introduced in the late 1980s.

    The Japanese were particularly adept at putting an obscure form of mathematics to use. They made lifts that adapted to the traffic flows of people going in and out of a building and microwaves which knew how long to defrost whatever you put into it. Fuzzy logic compensated for blur in video camera movement in a similar manner to way smartphone manufacturers now use neural networks on images.

    The Japanese promoted fuzzy logic inside products to the home market, but generally backed off from promoting it abroad. The features just were and consumers accepted them over time. In a quote that is now eerily reminiscent of our time a spokesperson for the American Electronics Association’s Tokyo office said to the Washington Post

    “Some of the fuzzy concepts may be valid in the U.S.,”

    “The idea of better energy efficiency, or more precise heating and cooling, can be successful in the American market,”

    “But I don’t think most Americans want a vacuum cleaner that talks to you and says, ‘Hey, I sense that my dust bag will be full before we finish this room.’ “

    This was also the case with the use technology companies made of Bayes Theory. This was used by the likes of Autonomy and Microsoft Research.

    A second technique was rules, put simply IF then THAT. This kind of technology has been used to drive automated trading models and credit card approvals for decades. Pegasystems are one of the leaders in developing rules based processing. Rules based systems could even be built in an Excel macro and would still count as a form of machine learning. 

    Finally machine learning needs to think about a number of things with regards the models being used:

    • The importance of accuracy in the use case
    • The level of precision required and ways to indicate that precision means
    • The cost of generation versus other methods, this is very important in terms of computing power and energy consumption 

    More information
    The Future of Electronics Looks Fuzzy | Washington Post (December 23, 1990)

  • Marketers: you are not a goldfish and neither is anyone else

    I have grown tired of a ridiculous statistic being used so frequently that it becomes marketing truth. It’s regurgitated in articles, blog posts, social media and presentations. The problem with it is that affects the way marketers view the world and conduct both planning and strategy. The picture below is a goldfish, his name is Diego. If you’ve managed to read this you aren’t Diego.

    Diego

    I realise that sounds a little dramatic, but check out this piece by Mark Jackson, who leads the Hong Kong and Shenzhen offices of Racepoint Global. It’s a good piece on the different elements that represent a good story (predominantly within a PR setting). And it is right that attention in a fragmented media eco-system will be contested more fiercely. But it starts with:

    Over the course of the last 20 years, the average attention span has fallen to around eight seconds; a goldfish has an attention span of nine! The challenge for companies – established and new – is to figure out how to get even a small slice of that attention span when so many other companies are competing for it.

    Mark’s piece is just the latest of a long line of marketing ‘thought leadership’ pieces that repeat this as gospel. The problem is this ‘truth’ is bollocks.

    It fails the common sense test. Given that binge watching of shows like Game of Thrones or sports matches is commonplace, book sales are still happening, they would have to be balanced out with millisecond experiences for this 8-second value to make any sense as an average. The goldfish claim is like something out of a vintage Brass Eye episode.

    To quote DJ Neil ‘Doctor’ Fox:

    Now that is a scientific fact! There’s no real evidence for it; but it is scientific fact

    Let’s say your common sense gets the better of your desire for a pithy soundbite and you decide to delve into the goldfish claim a bit deeper.  If one took a little bit of time to Google around it would become apparent that the goldfish ‘fact’ is dubious. It originally came from research commissioned by Microsoft’s Advertising arm ‘How does digital affect Canadian attention spans?‘. The original link to the research now defaults to the home page of Microsoft Advertising. Once you start digging into it, the goldfish wasn’t actually part of the research, but was supporting desk research and thats when its provenance gets murky.

    PolicyViz in a 2016 blog post The Attention Span Statistic Fallacy called it out and provided links to the research that they did into the the goldfish ‘fact’ in 2016 – go over and check their article out. The BBC did similar detective work a year later and even went and asked an expert:

    “I don’t think that’s true at all,” says Dr Gemma Briggs, a psychology lecturer at the Open University.

    “Simply because I don’t think that that’s something that psychologists or people interested in attention would try and measure and quantify in that way.”

    She studies attention in drivers and witnesses to crime and says the idea of an “average attention span” is pretty meaningless. “It’s very much task-dependent. How much attention we apply to a task will vary depending on what the task demand is.”

    There are some studies out there that look at specific tasks, like listening to a lecture.

    But the idea that there’s a typical length of time for which people can pay attention to even that one task has also been debunked.

    “How we apply our attention to different tasks depends very much about what the individual brings to that situation,” explains Dr Briggs.

    “We’ve got a wealth of information in our heads about what normally happens in given situations, what we can expect. And those expectations and our experience directly mould what we see and how we process information in any given time.”

    But don’t feel too bad, publications like Time and the Daily Telegraph were punked by this story back in 2015. The BBC use the ‘fact’ back in 2002, but don’t cite the source.  Fake news doesn’t just win elections, it also makes a fool of marketers.

    This whole thing feels like some marketer (or PR) did as poor a job as many journalists in terms of sourcing claims and this ‘truth’ gradually became reinforcing. Let’s start taking the goldfish out of marketing.

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