Serendipity Book

The 10 rules of buyer behaviour

Professor Andrew Ehrenberg's rules of buyer behaviour ...

1. A standard model, the Dirichlet (from German mathematician, JPG Dirichlet), describes the relationship between share and purchasing frequency of brands in many markets, and can be used predictively, where the market is broadly stable. Larger brands are bought marginally more frequently than their penetration suggests socalled 'double jeopardy'. 

2. Most consumers have repertoires of habitually purchased brands (for durables, 'consideration sets' take the place of repertoires). 

3. Within an individual's repertoire, purchase propensities are mostly steady, but individual repertoires vary widely. 

4. A brand will have few 100% users (typically around 10%), and these are usually light users (of category and brand) they are rarely important to the brand's total volume. 

5. Heavy brand buyers are few, but important. The '80:20' rule applies here defined as the 50% heaviest buyers accounting for around 80% of volume. 

6. Most brand buyers are light buyers they buy (in total) more of other brands. 

7. When sales increase, new buyers come into the brand frequency among existing buyers does not change. 

8. Where as 48% repeatbuy a brand from quarter to quarter, only 40% do so year to year the 'leaky bucket' effect. 

9. 'Dealsensitive' buyers are only sensitive to deals on brands they already buy. 

10. Price sensitivity is market-specific, few consumers are price sensitive across a range of markets.

Source: ADMAP October 2003 - which in turn references the following works by Ehrenberg et al: 

1. Added values or propensities to buy, ASC Ehrenberg and JA Scriven, Admap, Sept 1997. 

2. Advertising: strongly persuasive or nudging? NR Barnard and ASC Ehrenberg, JAR Jan/Feb 1997. 

3. Advertising and price, ASC Ehrenberg et al, JAR May/June 1997. 

4. Advertising and product demand, N Barnard and ASC Ehrenberg, Admap, May 1997. 

5. Differentiation or salience, ASC Ehrenberg et al, JAR, Nov/Dec 1997. 

6. How consumers buy a new brand, ASC Ehrenberg, Admap, March 1997. 

7. Advertising and brand attitudes, N Barnard and ASC Ehrenberg, Admap Conference, March 1998. 

8. Justifying our advertising budgets, ASC Ehrenberg et al, Admap, March 1998.

The stuff that sells newspapers No.2

As one of the comments says: "I wonder if this headline is about crime or just the average price of bottled water in central london".

Photo credit: LinkMachineGo

Microsoft's User Research Programme

Bill Gates was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart this week. During the interview he briefly discusses the research that went into his new billion dollar product...

So Microsoft consulted 50 families in 7 countries, leading to 800 product actions in Vista. A further 5 million people beta tested the OS before it launched. I wonder if we'll notice the difference?

And is it me or did Bill Gates provide the voice for Kermit?

There are no facts, only interpretations

I'm still reading Andrew Marr's 'My Trade' . Marr is a British TV presenter and has previously been the political editor of the BBC and before that was the editor of The Independent newspaper. 'My Trade' is a fantastic warts and all autobiographical take on the world of journalism.

Early on in the book, Marr spends some time reflecting on the anatomy of news and discusses why news bears so little relationship to fact ...

"What is a news story? This question confronts most hacks most days of their working life. Of course there are human events which interest almost everyone. We are perpectually intrigued by the extreme, the gruesome, the outlandish. But there is not a reliable supply of these events.

So journalists learn to take less extraordinary things and fashion them into words that will make them seem like news instead. Journalists reshape real life, cutting away details, simplifying events, 'improving' ordinary speech, sometimes inventing quotes, to create a narrative which will work.

It isn't only journalists. Everyone does it, most of the time, mostly unconsciously. We hear a piece of gossip and as we retell it, we improve it, smoothing away irrelevance and sharpening the point; we turn experiences of friends and relatives into bolder, more heroic or tragic episodes than they really are. Above all, we turn our own daily life into a chain of 'stories', always looking for shape and meaning in the cascade of experience. Journalism is the industrialisation of gossip.

He concludes that "news is not facts" and the job of a journalist is "not, I repeat not, to give a blandly  accurate account of an unremarkable moment, but to have found 'the story' or failing that 'a story'."

As Nietzsche said: "There are no facts, only interpretations".

Panning Time Lapse Photography

Fantastic panning time lapse film created by Ollie Larkin using a digital still camera (shame he can't spell 'piece' but I suppose you can't be good at everything) ...

Posted to YouTube as a response to this urban static time lapse film (particularly love the airport footage here)...

The Rubik's Cube is back

Hasbro reports a strong year for the Rubik's cube (Newsday - 23rd Jan)

"The cube never wholly went away. But now it's being discovered by a new generation. Hasbro Inc., which distributes the Rubik's Cube, says sales were up 73 percent in 2005 and are expected to be up another 80 percent for 2006."

So get practising:

And if you really want to show off, follow film director Michel Gondry's example and try with your feet:

I can't believe we still have to protest this crap

Seen at the United for Peace protest march in Washington DC on Saturday:

Photo Credit: Bill D'Agostino

More pictures from the march here.

The Rise of Nutritionism

I just found a very interesting essay by Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma in the New York Times on the rise of nutritionism and the impact that marketing, science and journalism have had on what we choose to eat.

Here are some edited highlights...

Nutritionism is not quite the same as nutrition. As the “ism” suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it’s exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather, all pervasive and virtually inescapable.

The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science and — ahem — journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding what is, after all, the most elemental question an omnivore confronts.

Humans deciding what to eat without expert help — something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees — is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, distinctly risky if you’re a nutritionist and just plain boring if you’re a newspaper editor or journalist. 

And so, like a large gray fog, a great Conspiracy of Confusion has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition — much to the advantage of everybody involved. Except perhaps the ostensible beneficiary of all this nutritional expertise and advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters.

So nutritionism is good for business. But is it good for us? You might think that a national fixation on nutrients would lead to measurable improvements in the public health. But for that to happen, the underlying nutritional science, as well as the policy recommendations (and the journalism) based on that science, would have to be sound. This has seldom been the case.

The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its 17,000 new food products introduced every year, and the marketing muscle used to sell these products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and marketing to help us decide questions about what to eat.

Nutritionism, which arose to help us better deal with the problems of the Western diet, has largely been co-opted by it, used by the industry to sell more food and to undermine the authority of traditional ways of eating.

Pollan closes with 9 pieces of nutritional advice:

1. Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best.

3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number

4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible.

5. Pay more, eat less.

6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.

7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are.

8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden.

9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases.

Inspirational Architecture - Harajuku Protestant Church, Tokyo

Found this fantastic series of photographs taken by a Flickr user called Doc18. They feature the incredible Harajuku Protestant Church in Tokyo which was apparently designed by Ciel Rouge Creation.

The stuff that sells newspapers No.1

This picture was taken at an Evening Standard pitch in London by Flickr user LinkMachineGo on October 6th 2006. The Daily Mail also ran with that story on the same day. You've sure got to hand it to those guys down at Associated Newspapers. They really know how to stir up a bit of outgroup hatred to shift a few more newspapers.

Reading the reaction of that guide dog owner reminded me of the Disability Rights Commission's Disability Debate website. The site is being heavily promoted on posters near my house which urge me to take part in the debate using the lame tagline: "Are you taking the dis?". Anyway, before I saw that Daily Mail article I was struggling to understand what the debate could possibly be about. I mean, who could possibly be against advancing the interests of the disabled? Now of course I know. It's the bogeyman.