Data is golddust
Published August 23rd, 2006 in GeneralI think I must be a little obsessive compulsive, but facts and figures about consumer behaviour fascinate me. Furthermore, my mind boggles as freely available information floats around unwittingly ignored by marketing executives that should know better. I guess it’s much easier to get caught up in the hype than actually sit down and look at the numbers.
John Wagner has posted some great commentary of late which grabbed my attention. Here’s a snippet:
There’s a big difference between people knowing about a product or service — “gettin’ the word” — and actually wanting to buy said product/service.
That’s the point Seth Godin makes here about the movie Snakes on a Plane — sure, people heard about it. They just didn’t want to go see it.
John also points out in another post:
You have to be careful when you listen to the customer … it’s critical that you don’t let a vocal minority carry you in a direction that is harmful to your overall brand
Some of Nick Carr’s recent commentary also strikes a similar tone.
Here are some instances where I feel companies are not looking at the reality of how consumers are actually behaving:
- Laura Ries points out that Dell should focus on the business market because “consumers account for only 15 percent of sales, but a disproportionate percentage of the service calls. As a result, Dell’s service representatives are overwhelmed with consumers who have bought cheap computers calling for help.“
- The MIT Advertising Lab reports that “Shoppers make last-minute purchases 45 percent less often when they use automated checkout machines, as opposed to waiting for a cashier to check them out, according to IHL Consulting Group. The drop in impulse purchases was greater for women (50 percent), than for men (27.9 percent), according to IHL, which polled 533 people to determine their shopping habits.“
- Mobile companies in Ireland are busily targeting ethnic communities after identifying them as valuable new revenue streams in a saturated market. Oddly enough not many other industries are taking the same approach. For example, I’ve noticed that migrant workers are far more likely to take holidays in Ireland than Irish people themselves. You only have to look at our hoarding of holiday entitlements to see that Irish tastes have shifted due to affluence. Yet for all the ads in foreign languages starting to appear in our newspapers, the tourism industry continues to ignore a body of people right on their own doorstep.
- And who doesn’t want to know a little more about how we use our mobile phones? The number of text messages we send continues to rise. Their rate of use heightens around sporting events and bank holiday weekends. Mobile companies are heavily involved in sports sponsorships, why don’t they try to encourage SMS use around these events? People in the States use their mobile phones to search for food (funny, but true.)
Technorati Tags: John Wagner, Marketing, Piaras Kelly, Consumer Behaviour
4 Responses to “Data is golddust”
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Snakes on a plane made 15Million so far. It’s a total b movie. There are plenty of Sam Jackson movies that have much much less with way better scripts. It’s the Internet nerds version of Rocky Horror.
“Shoppers make last-minute purchases 45 percent less often when they use automated checkout machines”
Thats a good thing, isn’t it? Less rotting teeth. Less waiting around. Why not reinvest the savings in checkout salaries into more imaginative product lines, instead of worrying about the drop in impulse purchases. Alot of people don’t like the way shops manipulate customers with sweets at checkout and so on?
snakes on a plane is an interesting test case - my view would be that, in the us, too many people knew about it. it’s been a story for far too long. the story of it being the-script-the-internet-wrote had grown tired by the time the film was released. the hype has also had the effect of hyping the financial expectations for the film - a 30m film taking 15m in its opening weekend isn’t bad. it shows the film will more than make a profit. but, given the hype, its a pretty piss-poor profit.
over this side of the atlantic though, the hype started much, much later. the internet is less a part of mainstream media, and so the whole snakes story wasn’t part of the mainstream for as long as it has been in the us. the hype peaked perfectly with the release of the film itself, and worked - people went to see it.
now if only the ryder cup promo whores could learn the lesson of this story and shut the feck up about their golf shindig …
btw the dell suggestion sounds too much like the banks’ decisions to jetison their personal account holders as they were the ones costing the bank the most and generating the least amount of revenue. v bad pr, but then, that’s banking for you. yes, dell have been having a pretty rough year. competitors have caught up on the supply-chain and logistics management savings. dell has taken hits over its ads and its terms and conditions. and, of course, there’s the exploding batteries 9which are actually sony batteries, but dell take the hit). saying retreat from the consumer market actually sounds like a scared pr going “oh my god, we can’t possibly handle this, ever!”
Piaras … great post. To me, the big issue surrounding SoaP was purely about hype, and about the desire of some vocal bloggers to drive a movie’s success so they could crow about the importance of social media.
SoaP may indeed turn out to be a cult favorite — a la Rocky Horror Picture Show or something — but then again, campy cult classics aren’t something that the Internet generation created.
The other issue to me that we should all learn from SoaP is that you can’t create viral interest. You can help it along when it happens, but those instances where people get excited about something like a movie are rare.