July 22, 2009 • 2:23 am 0
Peter Sorgenfrei was quoted in this BusinessWeek column by Ben Kunz:
Viralsourcing: Let Crowds Create Your Ad Message – Not only are fans spreading the word about products—they’re now helping to design and build marketing campaigns from the get-go.
Filed under: Marketing , Advertising, Consumer, Crowdbands, Entertainment, ideas, Marketing, Music, Network, Online
July 21, 2009 • 2:01 am 0
From Automobile Magazine:
Bill Reinert, Toyota’s in-house energy guru and resident contrarian, looks like he’s just taken a whiff of a long-expired container of milk.
Reinert is serving on a future-of-the-car panel at a high-powered green-think conference sponsored by Fortune magazine and featuring heavyweights such as President Bill Clinton and Bill Ford. Although the symposium is being held in a button-down bastion of Orange County, the ambience is totally Silicon Valley, all iPhones and Aeron chairs, with lots of clever but undercapitalized tech entrepreneurs sniffing around for angel investors. At the moment, Shai Agassi, the charismatic founder of Better Place, is making a dynamic pitch for creating vast networks of battery-charging stations to support electric vehicles that will, he claims, be cheaper than the equivalent gasoline-powered cars. While executives from Ford, BMW, and Fisker Automotive listen with polite smiles, Reinert squirms in his seat, crosses and recrosses his legs, and generally behaves like a schoolkid who can’t wait for the bell to ring so he can escape for recess.
When it’s his turn to speak, Reinert bites his tongue. He mildly questions the viability of Agassi’s wildly improbable plan to create battery-swapping stations for the coming wave of EVs. He lobs a few gentle barbs in the direction of the ethanol lobby, which he privately regards with unalloyed scorn. He outlines his genuinely radical vision of a future where publicly owned and shared cars are used to complete urban mass-transit systems. But by and large, he’s on his best behavior, showing the benevolent public face of the world’s greenest car company. Until the mics are turned off.
“That’s the first law of Disney at work–wishing will make it so,” he mutters shortly after bolting out of the conference room and yanking off his tie. “Using ethanol for fuel is like electing the dumbest kid in school as class president. As for plug-in electrics, they’re just not plausible right now. Lithium-ion batteries are too expensive by at least an order of magnitude. They’re not energy-dense enough. And we generate a lot of our electricity from coal. I don’t think Shai is being disingenuous. I think he really believes what he’s saying. I see it all the time from those Palo Alto types. They think the whole world is like a computer company, and they’re always trying to recreate the dot-com economy. You see exactly the same mind-set with Tesla. It’s all going to work out. It worked out with eBay. It worked out with SAP. But transportation is a different world. I mean, Shai’s bragging about driving an electric RAV4 with a seventy-mile range. How many of your friends are going to buy that car?”
Filed under: Automotive , Automotive, Cars, Consumer, Energy, Future, Gasoline, Innovation, Technology
May 19, 2009 • 12:43 am 0
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.
Filed under: Information, Market Research, Marketing , Consumer, Market Research, Marketing, Psychology, Research
May 11, 2009 • 1:00 am 0
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.
Filed under: Information, Market Research , Consumer, Lifestyle, Research, Technology
March 6, 2009 • 2:24 pm 0
We are looking for a new intern. One of the candidates submitted this article as a response to our test. We had given him this article to comment on.
Over the past two weeks, Amazon has made two moves to “kindle” some interest in the e-book industry.
As it appears, Amazon is not only taking a page out of Apple’s design prowess by streamlining its software to make a satisfying user experience, but they are also capitalizing on the iPhone’s ubiquitous nature by using the device as platform to distribute their content. Quite the bold move. Instead of recognizing Apple as a potential competitor, Amazon must believe that their strength within the publishing industry and their “first-mover” status will provide enough protection as they attempt to build a market.
Interestingly enough, Amazon’s new found strategy is strikingly different to that of which Mr. Jobs utilized with the launch of iPod/iTunes. Amazon is looking to exploit the potentially significant profit margin from digitally distributing books (which requires no physical material costs, shipping costs, or warehousing costs), thereby turning their focus to e-books as a service provider.
Contrastingly, Apple’s focus is on their hardware that carries an extremely high profit margin, while iTunes (their service provider) was initially created as a loss-leader (yet many have questioned the validity of that assertion over the past year).
Original article
Filed under: Innovation, Marketing , Consumer, Gadgets, Innovation, Technology
February 6, 2009 • 3:17 am 0
From BMRB:
Women are more likely to take a prudent approach to their finances while men are more bullish, according to latest findings from the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB) Consumer Confidence Survey.
Only 1 in 10 adults say they definitely feel financially secure in the current economic climate, but women (6%) are less than half as likely to feel financially secure as men (14%).
More women are likely to have cut back on purchases recently (75%) than men (67%). Indeed men seem to have a much more gung ho attitude with 29% spending “exactly as I did before” compared with 22% women.
In terms of what people are reducing expenditure on, men are more likely to cut back on eating out (36%) than women (30%), while women (14%) are nearly twice as likely to cut back on clothes (8% men)
A third of all adults are likely to spend £3000 or more on a single item of expenditure in the next 12 months. Again, this is more likely among men (38%) than women (27%).
In their general attitude to money, BMRB’s latest TGI data shows that more women (58%) believe they are very good at managing money than men (53%) and that they have a higher propensity (68%) to spend money more carefully than they used to, than men (63%).
Filed under: Market Research , Consumer, Market Research, Spending
February 5, 2009 • 9:25 am 0
From wsj.com
The giant manufacturer of household staples including Pampers diapers, Crest toothpaste and Gillette razors is forging a new business model: franchising car washes.
To jump-start plans for a nationwide chain of Mr. Clean Car Wash franchises, P&G in December acquired the franchise assets of Atlanta-based Carnett’s Car Wash, which has 14 locations.
“We need to look for new opportunities to allow us to grow,” says Bruce Brown, P&G’s chief technology officer. “That isn’t limited to things within our current business model.”
P&G is under mounting pressure to find new sources of revenue growth, particularly as more cash-strapped shoppers think twice about buying its premium-priced products. Wall Street is increasingly skeptical that the mammoth company can garner meaningful gains in its slow-growing product categories and a tough economy.
Known for exhaustively testing new ideas, Procter & Gamble has been quietly experimenting with service businesses in recent years. Since 2007, it has operated two Mr. Clean Car Washes near its Cincinnati headquarters. Last year, it unveiled three Tide dry-cleaning shops in Kansas City, Kan., area. Also in 2007, P&G said it bought a minority stake in membership-based medical services firm MDVIP, based in Boca Raton, Fla.
Full article
Filed under: Automotive, Innovation, Marketing , Consumer, Innovation, P&G
February 3, 2009 • 4:10 am 0
From iVillage
Wondering whether to partake of that expired yogurt at the back of the fridge? What about that hunk of cheese with the bit of mold on top?
If you’re like most Americans, you’ll take the chance, a new study shows. In fact, spoiled or past-due foods that most people would quickly reject at the supermarket are much more eagerly consumed once they make it home.
That’s because consumers are more likely to eat dubious foods once they actually own them, another sign of how people unconsciously give more value to things that are theirs, researchers say.
“We try to come up with justifications about why it’s OK to consume what we already own and downplay the reasons why it might not be OK,” said study co-author Lauren Block, a professor of marketing at Baruch College in New York City.
Filed under: Market Research, Marketing , Consumer, Food, Research
January 30, 2009 • 5:28 am 2
A yearlong study identifies the vehicle whose drivers get ticketed the most. The research suggests that what you drive may indicate how you drive.
Drivers of Hummer SUVs were 4.63 times more likely to get a traffic ticket than the average driver, concludes a yearlong study by a company that helps insurers identify risks.
ISO Quality Planning, the San Francisco company that studied the records of 1.7 million drivers, compiled a list of ticket magnets that confirmed some long-held notions: Owners of the 507-horsepower Mercedes-Benz CLS63 AMG and similarly muscular CLK63 AMG received outsized numbers of tickets, as did the generally young owners of the relatively inexpensive Scion tC, xB and xA, and the Audi A4 sports sedan.
But also on that most-ticketed list were the Subaru Outback and the Toyota Camry Solara and Matrix, three cars not known for great speed or expressing the rebellious nature of their owners. Meanwhile, the Chevrolet Tahoe and Suburban, virtually identical mechanically to their General Motors sibling Hummer, appeared on the least-ticketed list.
Sharing the bottom of the list? Buicks, minivans and pickups.
Analysts at ISO Quality Planning were more than willing to pile on.
“The sense of power that Hummer drivers derive from their vehicle may be directly correlated with the number of violations they incur,” said Raj Bhat, the president of ISO Quality Planning. “Or perhaps Hummer drivers, by virtue of their driving position, are less likely to notice road hazards, signs, pedestrians and other drivers.”
What ISO Quality Planning believed the data show about Toyota drivers was unclear from its news release.
Insurance claims data generally back up ISO Quality Planning’s findings. Ratings information from State Farm, for instance, advises Hummer owners to expect to pay significantly higher than standard premiums for liability. Likewise, Scion owners typically face much higher than standard rates for comprehensive and collision insurance.
Most-ticketed *Rate Least-ticketed *Rate
Hummer H2/H3 463% Jaguar XJ sedan 11%
Scion tC 460% Chevrolet Suburban 16%
Scion XB 403% Chevrolet Tahoe 21%
*Violations per 100,000 miles driven, expressed as percentage of average.
From MSN
Filed under: Automotive, Information, Market Research , Automotive, Consumer
• 3:53 am 0
After yesterday’s post on memory we heard about this one from the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology:
“Can bad weather improve your memory? An unobtrusive field study of natural mood effects on real-life memory.”
Psychologists have known for some time that mood can have an effect on memory: for example, we’re more likely to remember events that are consistent with our current state of mind, and a bad mood is known to reduce the likelihood of people recalling false memories.
In the latter case, the theory is that a bad mood triggers a more sceptical, careful mode of processing, in contrast to the less vigilant, conceptual thinking style that characterises a good mood. Now Joseph Forgas and colleagues have taken this line of work out of the lab and into the real world, showing how the weather can affect our memory via its effects on our mood.
The researchers employed the help of a newsagents shop in Sydney and tested the ability of 73 shoppers to recall ten objects, including a piggy savings jar and toy cars, that were placed around the counter. The shoppers were quizzed after they left the store, with half of them tested on rainy, cloudy days and the others tested on bright, sunny days.
A mood questionnaire confirmed that the shoppers tested on rainy days were in a worse mood than those tested on a sunny day. And the memory test showed the rainy-day shoppers correctly identified three times as many items as the participants tested on a sunny day. Moreover, the rainy-day shoppers were less likely to have false memories for objects that hadn’t been around the counter.
“This finding suggests that some allowance for such mood effects could be incorporated in applied domains such as legal, forensic, counselling and clinical practice,” the researchers said.
A possible methodological flaw is that the rainy-day shoppers might have spent longer in the store, but a follow-up study showed that shoppers spent no longer in the shop on rainy days relative to sunny days.
This appears to be the latest example of an emerging trend among memory researchers to take their work out of the lab – just last year, researchers at Goldsmith’s College performed an experiment at the London Dungeons to examine the effect of fear on eye-witness memory.
Filed under: Market Research, Science , Consumer, Experiments, Mood, Psychology
