gwendolyn faith is not a crayon.
I work in advertising. I play in the kitchen.
I’m part tweenager. (Look at my iTunes playlist.)
I’m part Grandma. (Look at my oversize cardi collection.)
I’m part Romy or Michelle. (Look at the height of my hair.)
I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy. C.S. Lewis hit the nail on the head, y'all.
I wish my life were a musical, but other than that, I’m pretty content.
(No surprise I also like to Yelp.)
In the past year or so, we’ve been witnessing the convergence of several trends – a shift in online behavior, where users of social media tend to be gravitating toward micro-social networks and smaller, more socially curated sites; the rise of micro-lending, micro-giving, and localism; the growth and innovation occurring in qualitative market research; the higher levels of participation and quality in smaller-scale forms of research; the pruning of “friends” in social networks and tightening of privacy controls, and other phenomena. While disparate in their form, they are all manifestations of a few basic principles:
- People want to feel that they are having an impact.
- People want smaller, more intimate, more meaningful social circles.
- People want brand relationships with a human face.
- Companies need to better understand their customers, in a human and not purely data-driven way.
- Privacy is starting to matter again.
It was about persuasion, but now it is about conversation—and it makes sense, of course. No one wants to just be talked at.
Don’t forget the miniaturizing of other things as well, like desserts and packaging :D ~ cake pop, anyone?
Categories are interesting to anthropologists. They are the “buckets” into which we organize the world. More exactly, they are the buckets with which we read the world. We have a bucket called “bird.” Inside that is a bucket called “Robin.” As spring approaches, we see winged creatures on our lawn and the buckets leap to the ready. Robin! Bird! Spring! This is culture in action.
From this point of view, Pinterest is a treasure. It’s a chance to see American culture as if from a glass-bottom boat. Yes, some of it is a little reductive. But sometimes what people stuff into the categories is a chance for us to see exactly what they mean. Pinterest is a little Rosetta Stone, a table of equivalencies. Oh, so that’s what YOU mean by home. Here’s what I mean. In a culture that flowers with an increasingly diverse variety, this is useful.
Grant McCracken in the Harvard Business Review post “Pinterest as Free Market Research”
I should probably write my own commentary instead of posting quotes all the time, but hel-lo, I have a research proposal to write! Actually, I have two research proposals to write. Ouch.
Mark Bittman in his New York Times op-ed piece “Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?”, a fascinating read about the way — and the why — Americans eat
An aside for my advertising friends: Katiy Woolard, a j-school alumna and a strategist at Now What Research in Boulder, taught me one way to find consumer insight is to identify a tension, two deep truths at odds with each other, around the subject at hand. Could be a tension between consumer perception and consumer perception. Could be a tension between a social norm and consumer behavior. Could be a tension between a social norm and brand behavior. A company, brand or organization can come into that tension point and find a solution, something that reconciles the opposing ideas.
The New York Times op-ed presents a clear tension between the chore of cooking at home and the fun of dining out. That leads to a consumer insight a brand or even an advocacy group could leverage: Cooking healthy food at home feels like work, but grabbing fast food is a treat I can always afford.
Don’t resign yourselves to a future where shopping online replaces shopping malls, boutiques and big-box stores, Trendwatching.com tells marketers in their September trend report. Despite the plethora of online options, shopping in the real world still satisfies consumers’ innate needs — the needs that drive them to shop in the first place.
RETAIL RENAISSANCE | Smart retailers are defying doom and gloom scenarios, as they realize that shopping in the real world will forever satisfy consumers’ deep rooted needs for human contact, for instant gratification, for the promise of (shared) experiences, for telling stories. Hence the flurry of new formats, technologies, capabilities, and products that now are delighting retail customers around the world.
When JWT Intelligence covers FOMO, you know it’s a thing. Actually, FOMO has probably always been a thing. But now with the influx of social media and smart phones, we’re all more aware of what we’re missing out on.
This week’s Iconowatch e-newsletter pushes the why of Millennials’ addiction to social media, smart phones and technology as a whole.
Tech gives us our own space - whenever and wherever we need it.
