What if something you thought you knew to be true, turned out to be exactly the opposite? What if an approach you imagined was working for you was actually working against you?
Imagine if it were true, for example, that almost nobody buys a product or service anymore simply because they need it, or because its price is the right price? That, even in an economic downturn, they have to want it as much as need it before they buy?
It’s a difficult concept to grasp because, at the end of the day, it’s not about rational thought. That notion is a wake-up call for products and brands who have built their businesses on pure reason.
Ask Gerald Zaltman, a Harvard scholar who suggests in his seminal book How Customers Think that only 5% of consumer purchasing behavior is based on rational thought processes, suggesting that 95% is due to subconscious motivation. I know it’s a hard statistic to swallow, but consider this: what if he’s only even half right?
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Filed under: Marketing, Uncategorized , Consumers, Market Research, Psychology, Retail, Spending
A new way of printing organic electronics is more reliable and yields higher performance.
It’s possible to print large, flexible arrays of cheap, plastic transistors to drive displays. But the performance of these organic electronics is still not consistent enough for commercial devices.
A new method for printing a wide variety of semiconducting organic compounds such as polymers is much more reliable–and on top of that, it improves the performance of a wide variety of these materials by a few orders of magnitude.
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Filed under: Innovation, Science , Energy, Gadgets, Innovation, Science, Technology
First Sharp announced the development of the world’s first waterproof solar-powered cell phone, and now the company has done the world one better by developing the thinnest solar module for mobile devices ever. The LROCGO2 Solar Module measures just 0.8 mm thick–the width of eight human hairs.
The Solar Module’s polycrystalline solar cells only provides 300 mW of power, so the device won’t replace traditional batteries any time soon. But it can act as a supplement for emergency situations or any time when a traditional cell phone charger is MIA. And since the module is fitted onto cell phones in the manufacturing process,it eliminates the need to carry around extra emergency solar chargers.
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Filed under: Innovation, Science , Design, Energy, Innovation, iphone, Research, Science, Technology
Last year in November we ran a survey with @warrenss among Twitter users about their perception of Brands using Twitter.
We just launched the follow-up study, so please take 2 minutes to complete these 11 questions.
Much appreciated:
Survey
Filed under: Market Research , Market Research, Online, Research
Recession-challenged consumers are buying less, looking for deals, or switching to different brands, product categories, or stores. Some are even changing long-held attitudes toward consumption. To many folks, filling the home with more stuff or keeping up with the Joneses is no longer appealing.
As a result, the degree of uncertainty in business and consumer markets has soared. Yet, to conserve cash, most firms are reducing spending on the market research that would help manage that uncertainty. In the U.S., spending on market research has dipped for four consecutive quarters, and chief marketing officers don’t expect the situation to turn around soon. Most big consumer marketers are seeking to shave 10 to 20% off of research budgets.
In flush times, a rising tide of consumption can compensate for less than optimal branding, positioning, pricing, or segmentation. That is certainly not the case now. At the same time that marketers must pare down research expenditures, they face added pressure to secure high-quality data and insights.
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Filed under: Information, Market Research, Marketing , Consumer, Market Research, Marketing, Psychology, Research
Americans continue to cut the landline in favor of wireless telephony. When money is tight, like during our current recession, cutting wired voice services makes a lot of economic sense.
The latest results from the National Center for Health Statistics’ survey on wireless phone use are in, and they reveal that just over 20 percent of all US households have now cut the wire and exclusively use cell phones for voice communication. That number is up from over 17 percent from the previous survey, and for the first time since the NCHS has been keeping track of wireless phone use, this number exceeds the percentage of households that rely on landline phones only—down to a little over 17 percent.
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Filed under: Information, Market Research , Consumer, Lifestyle, Research, Technology
Each year, around 10 million vehicles are disposed of in the United States. Before vexing your conscience though, you should know that over 95 percent of these “retired” cars head straight to one of the 7,000 vehicle recycling operations around the country and 75 percent of these cars’ parts are completely recycled, letting cars claim top spot as the world’s most recycled product.
Cars are (surprisingly) the world’s most recycled product. Find out which parts of your car end up as landfill, and which parts don’t in this article from posci.com
Filed under: Automotive , Automotive, Cars, Consumers
