A column in the Times today in which the writer describes organizing photos taken on a family vacation includes this:
The downside of being able to shoot and store all the photos you want at little or no cost is that you can shoot or store all the photos you want. (Experts are suggesting that the average number of times a photo is viewed is dropping from one toward zero very rapidly.)
It’s the part that I’ve put in bold that interests me. Maybe it’s just a joke. Is it? Or is anybody familiar with any research or expertise or studies of this subject?
NYT describes new 1-800-Flowers.Com ad campaign with consumer involvement component:
The company is holding a “Will You Marry Me?” contest to find the season’s most intriguing marriage proposal. Love-smitten users can log on to a special 1-800-Flowers.com YouTube channel starting on Monday and submit a video of themselves proposing.
The winning video will be on YouTube’s front page on Feb. 11.
“top quality,” originally uploaded by jspad.
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Returned Goods: How unwanted product flows back into the consumer ecosystem.
This week’s Consumed column in The New York Times Magazine is about how “reverse logistics” processes are changing, to deal more efficiently with the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of goods consumers return every year — ranging from the defective to the perfectly-good-but unwanted.
Electronics makers are trying to get better at evaluating the “perishable” products that we send back to them to sort the useless from the potentially re-sellable. Some spin this as e-waste-reducing “social responsibility,” but there’s another factor as well: “There’s a huge market” for returned electronics,” one professor says. And indeed, one firm specializing in such re-selling liquidates $3.5 million worth of merchandise every day.
Read the column here.
From “Agamemnon’s Truth,” by Javier Cercas, in Granta:98:
I know you’re not going to believe me, but the truth is there’s nothing better than success. Nothing or almost nothing, as long as you know enough to keep the idea out of your head that you’ve stolen your success from someone who deserved it more, and that all success is disgrace and humiliation, and that it’s always contaminated in some way by stupidity…
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Uncategorized by Rob Walker on January 4, 2008
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Roy’s
Originally uploaded by goplacia
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The WSJ had a Q&A today with the head of a company that makes hard drives. The main angle was that they’re trying to boost business by making hard drives that look snazzy. (The headline is: “Can A Hard Drive Make a Fashion Statement?”)
Apparently only 4% of computer users back up their data, and most of those have had some bad experience with lost data in the past. So if that’s true, there’s a pretty big market out there. And backing up your data is an extremely good idea. So this corporate honcho guy observes that “We need to go out and market why you’ve got to do it.” Seems obvious enough. But he goes on to say this:
You take someone like Apple. They could spend $150 million to $200 million on a marketing campaign and not blink an eye. I sat there and watched someone propose a $20 million marketing campaign. And we just vomited all over him. Two days later, my CFO and I approved a $950 million research-and-development budget in about 15 minutes, but to spend $20 million on marketing. We just don’t know how to do that. It just drives us nuts. But we’re going to have to get over it.
Part of what’s interesting about this — aside from the fact that he seems to be simultaneously aware of what he thinks his company should be doing and why, yet unable to do it — is that I so rarely read/hear anyone mention Apple’s massive marketing spends as part of the company’s success. Yes its products are innovative and the design and aesthetics leading-edge, etc. But they also market like crazy, and spend a lot of money doing so — 30-second TV ads very much included. (I have no idea, by the way, if the specific figures he mentions are real or made up.)
I guess people don’t talk/write about this because it’s out of step with the current conventional wisdom about the death of advertising and how now we are only influenced by our Trusted Friends and whatnot. I remember interviewing an exec at Apple a couple of years ago (re the iPod) and talking about this specifically, and I was completely expecting him to say “Well a great product like the iPod sells itself.” But when I said something like that to him, he pretty much laughed at me.
Amusing, and interesting, piece in the Times Styles section today, by Stephanie Rosenbloom, about how people “manage” their online identities includes this:
[T]he attractiveness of the friends on your Facebook profile affects the way people perceive you. [A study] found that Facebook users who had public postings on their wall (an online bulletin board) from attractive friends were considered to be significantly better looking than people who had postings from unattractive friends.
I use an icon as my Facebook profile picture, so I’m not sure where that leaves me in terms of my impact on the perceived attractiveness of my “friends.” But I’m guessing that if I used a real photo, all the Times readers in my contacts would be un-friending me right now.
Anyway, the article, which is worth a read, also deals with the less-than-truths of “online presentation strategies” — a topic I address in a forthcoming Fast Company column, actually.
I gather that this is real:
Godin himself discusses here. Alex, if you’re out there: I’m very tempted to buy this for you. You know you want it. Via Snarkhunting..
So the Iowa caucus is upon is. What about it? Well, drawing parallels between the selling of political candidates and the selling of consumer goods is an old game, dating back at least to the Eisenhower era, and probably earlier. An iteration of this idea that’s gotten more attention lately is the (potential) connection between our consumer choices and our political ideologies. Over the weekend, a Times story about Democratic candidates digging for caucus-goers made passing mention of the Clinton and Obama campaigns relying on “sophisticated voter identification models, using detailed demographic and consumer data.”
In terms of political strategy, the interesting thing about these tactics is they have nothing to do with targeting the so-called “swing voter.” They are about identifying, partly on the basis of consumer behavior, people who are most likely to support your candidate. The effort then goes into making sure such people do so – that they actually go to the polls. It’s not about persuasion, it’s about motivation. (This is doubly important in the bizarre caucus system, of course.)
As an exercise in linking consumption and identity, what’s significant about it is that it only works if that demographic and consumer data really does give a good clue as to who someone will vote for.
Which sounds a little fishy.
Certinaly when it gets reduced to the extreme shorthand version. An example popped up in a recent New Republic piece about the Democratic nomination battle in Iowa, which quoted an unnamed Clinton operative, trying to spin Obama as out of touch with blue-collar workers, referring to him as “the arugula candidate.” Elsewhere there was mention of a pundit saying that, along similar lines, Obama has a “wine track” image that he needs to shed, in favor of a “beer track” image. This was followed by an anecdote suggested Obama has indeed tweaked a regular stump speech anecdote in which usually mentioned a glass of wine, to “a glass of wine or a beer.”
It’s easy to make fun of this as mere pundit-think – surely there is more to you or me than our appetite for arugula, or relative feelings about beer or wine. But when you get past the soundbites it turns out that the efforts to link politics and consumer behavior are pretty sophisticated … or at least complicated.
Another recent piece, in The New Yorker, mentioned the work of a firm called Strategic Telemetry, presently working for the Obama campaign, which “builds profiles of voters that include more than a thousand indicators, long strings of data—everything from income to education to pet ownership—that [the firm’s founder] calls ‘demographic DNA.’”
“The actual combinations that we come up with aren’t really anything that you could put on a bumper sticker,” Strasma told me. “You know, soccer moms or office-park dads. Sometimes people will ask to see the formula, and it comes out to ten thousand pages long.” When the demographic DNA is combined with polling and interviews with Iowa voters, Strasma is able to create the political equivalent of a FICO score—the number that creditors use to determine whether a consumer is a good bet to repay a loan. Strasma’s score tells the campaign of the likelihood that a specific Iowan will support Obama.
Several members of the Bush 2004 campaign team put out a book a year or two ago called Applebee’s America, which deals with similar material: Basically, that campaign’s mining of consumer data to figure out which voters to target. “If you’re a voter living in one of the sixteen states that determined the 2004 election,” the authors wrote, “the Bush team had your name on a spreadsheet with your hobbies and habits, vices and virtues, favorite foods, sports, and vacation venues, and many other facts of your life.”
According to the book, much of the mined data came from a company called Axciom, owner of the “largest collection of consumer data in the U.S.,” drawn from credit card companies, retailers, airlines, and “scores of other places where people do business.” In the election, the book said, Axciom gave (or sold to) the Bush team “a list … showing the stage of life (age, marital status, number of children, etc.) and lifestyles (hunter, biker, home renter, SUV owner, level of religious intrest) of each voter, drawn from a menu of more than four hundred separate categories.”
Again, the fact that the campaign was using this data to identify sympathetic potential voters (who as I understand it were then bombarded with direct mail and other more traditional entreaties to get them to the polls), significantly raises the stakes on the question of whether such demographic profiles are accurate. If a formula based on buying habits identifies the wrong people, a campaign risks motivating hostile voters – the worst possible outcome. And as the book described it, some weird things came up. “Dr Pepper is the only sugared soft drink that has a GOP-leaning consumer base,” the authors wrote. Also: Many republicans watched Will & Grace. They say the Bush team “didn’t know why” some of these patterns existed — and “didn’t care.” They just wanted it to work.
Did it? In the end, they say, their program “was able to predict with 80 to 90 percent certainty whether a person would vote republican, according to postelection surveys conducted by the Bush team.”
Obviously I have no way of knowing whether that’s true, or whether it’s politico bluster. But if it’s even close to true, it’s a pretty interesting statement consumer behavior revealing very surprising things. Interesting enough that I’m guessing the Dems are spending serious money trying to mine that data — and that we’ll see more such efforts in the future.
Looking at everyone else’s lists of favorite songs or albums of the year makes me reflect on what my own choices might be. I suppose this is natural and lots of people do the same. I wonder how far others get, because in general I don’t get far at all. I can’t remember what came out when, I tend to overrate the stuff I’ve acquired most recently, and so on. I don’t know that I’ve ever progressed from idly wondering to even jotting down a few tentative choices — let alone really nailing down a Top Ten. How do these list-makers keep track? Do they take notes all year long?
Besides, I’ve always been vaguely annoyed at the underlying conceit of the top songs/albums “of the year,” since much of the music I acquire in any given year wasn’t actually released that year. I dislike the idea of organizing my taste reactions to the calendar of the music business, because that’s not how I listen. And it’s not how I think most people listen.
But reading over the lists this year, it occurred to me that I now do so much listening on iTunes that I could take a different approach, and simply review the data. This won’t help in coming up with a list of albums, because I don’t buy that many new albums anymore, I tend to buy songs, or batches of songs. Even if I buy a new release on CD – or, more typically, an old release – it’s rare that I keeping every single track from it in iTunes.
Still, I’m fairly fastidious about keeping up the parts of my iTunes data that I’m responsible for (making sure the proper release year, to the best of my knowledge, is entered). And I actually use the one-to-five-star rating field.
Plus there’s lots of data I’m not responsible for: How many times a track has been played, what date it was added to iTunes, when it was played last, and so on.
So, this morning, before listening to anything, I went into iTunes and gathered up what data I could. I looked at what I’d rated highest, and what I’d listened to most often. Perhaps predictably, there were some disparities. Namely, the most-listened-to songs were not the same ones I’d pick as my favorites. I’ll get to that in a minute, but to arrive at a Top Ten I had to overlook some data and just apply, you know, subjectivity. (It’s my list, after all.) Still, what I arrived at was definitely affected by having looked at the data first. If you’re curious, full details after the jump. Here are my ten:
- “You Know I’m No Good,” Amy Winehouse
- “Psychedelic Woman (Bonobo Remix),” Honny & The Bees Band
- “Girls In Their Summer Clothes,” Bruce Springsteen
- “All Out King (featuring Romanowskiy),” Up, Bustle & Out
- “La La La,” Mexican Institute of Sound
- “Salt Truck,” Eleni Mandell
- “Trouble,” Over the Rhine
- “Paper Planes,” M.I.A.
- “Oh My God,” Mark Ronson featuring Lily Allen
- “My Computer Is Funk,” DJ Bitman
So here — in disturbing detail — is some of the process I used to get to this list: Please continue…
Back in October I mentioned a service called Catalog Choice, which is designed to let you opt out of, well, catalogs. I signed up, and have been steadily typing in catalog information ever since. But I can’t say I’ve seen a notable reduction in how many show up in the mail, week after week.
They tell you to wait ten weeks for results, or something like that, so I figured maybe it would just take time. But recently Business Week wrote about the service and it turns out there’s another issue. Apparently what Catalog Choice does is collect this data and turn it over to the catalog retailers, who are supposed to act on it by purging people like me from their lists. But BW says at least some retailers simply “blew off” off this information, and “have done nothing with the names.” And an email from something called The Direct Marketing Association to its members is quoted:
Bearing the subject line “JUST SAY NO,” it warned retailers that Catalog Choice’s “priority is to eliminate catalogs as a marketing medium. It is not in your interest to further their efforts!”
Evidently few retailers were willing to talk to BW. LL Bean claimed it is “evaluating [the Catalog Choice data] for accuracy.” Williams-Sonoma/Pottery Barn “says it ‘is still figuring out the right thing to do for our customers.'”
It would presumably be more accurate to say they’re still trying to figure out the right thing to do for their bottom line. After all, pretty much everybody claims to hate catalogs — but obviously lots of people order from them just the same. So the basic operating procedure is to send catalogs to people who say they don’t want them, and maybe even believe they don’t want them. It might seem wasteful to spend money pursuing such people, but I’m guessing the payoff is there: Annoying potential customers is, really, part of the business model. The question likely boils down to whether the Catalog Choice effort can make a big enough issue of this to embarrass the companies into deciding that maybe its annoyance-to-profits algorithm needs an adjustment.
By popular demand (well, as a result of two request/complaints), Murketing.com now has a search feature. It’s in the sidebar to the right, and is labeled “Search.”
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Uncategorized by Rob Walker on December 31, 2007
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Erik’s Castle
Originally uploaded by Quino Terceño
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Edward Boyd: He knew advertising was all about fantasy — but it was a fantasy that black consumers might want to be part of.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a certain unease could be detected about the American drift toward a culture of selling, marketing and consumerism. Even Fortune magazine opined in 1947 that “the American citizen lives in a state of siege from dawn till bedtime,” seeming to echo the sentiments raised in the best-selling novel “The Hucksters” and the celebrated play “Death of a Salesman.” One sales executive at the time, a man named Edward Boyd, later recalled leaving a performance of Arthur Miller’s famous play in tears. “I related to it,” he said. Even so, Boyd stuck with his job, possibly because his own role in the machinery of American selling was a bit more complex: He was a black man building an African-American sales force within the Pepsi-Cola Company when corporate America was anything but integrated….
Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site.
Note: This column is a little unusual in being a person, but that’s because it’s part of the Magazine’s annual “The Lives They Lived” issue. Boyd died earlier this year. As the column notes, his story is a significant part of Stephanie Capparell’s recent book, The Real Pepsi Challenge.
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