The Marmite effect

People are creatures of habit. A new study by economists from the universities of Tilburg and Chicago* tracks the consumption patterns of American households over two years and finds striking evidence that such loyalty is widespread, deep and long-lasting. People are extremely loyal to the brands of their youth. The implications of this finding could be that more advertising does not help in switching people to other brands. And the benefits of being the first brand into a market could last longer than might be assumed.^

Markets that cater to migrants, whether from a different part of the country or from far-flung corners of the globe, are not just great for gourmands. They are also testament to the fact that people often retain very strong preferences for the kinds of food they grew up eating. Just ask the expatriate Britons who flock to “Tea and Sympathy” in New York’s Greenwich Village for pots of Marmite, a yeast-based spread whose delights baffle other nationalities (and many of their own compatriots). Such nostalgia is the most obvious example of the influence exerted by loyalty to the brands of your youth.

The new study finds a clever way to test this idea. The researchers had data on the purchases of 238 kinds of packaged goods by 38,000 American families between 2006 and 2008. For each of the goods in question, the data allowed them to calculate the share of the most-preferred brand as a fraction of the purchases of the two leading brands. Different regions showed a lot of variation: there were clear local patterns in consumption, although the same brands were available everywhere.

But 16% of people studied were migrants: they had grown up in one state and moved to another. They had the same options, in terms of what was on offer and at what price, as everyone else in their adopted home. But although they consumed more local favourites than someone in their native state would have, they bought fewer local hits (and more of the favourites from back home) than a longtime resident. And this gap between the purchases of migrants and that of the locally born was quite stubborn: although it faded the longer a person lived in their new state, it still took 20 years to halve in magnitude. Even 50 years on, it was still large enough to show up in the data.

Past research has shown that people are often willing to pay much more for a favoured brand than for seemingly identical alternatives. It is not always obvious why. For instance, people routinely express a strong liking for a brand that they are unable to tell apart from rivals in blind tests. And many studies have found that advertising alone cannot explain the strength of brand loyalty. So it seems plausible that a person’s past may play a role. Someone who spent their formative years in The Netherlands, may always hanker for Calve Pindakaas, a local Dutch peanut butter.

Article economist

Top 5 Enterprises Using Social Media

You can always learn from the best examples.
5 companies that use social media

1)The National Wildlife Federation

2)Ann Taylor

3)The Muppets studio



4)Whole Foods


5)Staples




5 top enterprises in social media

10 Tips for Corporate Blogging

In a world where small businesses with corporate blogs receive 55 percent more traffic than small businesses that don’t blog, companies should be taking note on how to improve their blogs, attract more readers and get more results.
But still, a lot of companies with corporate blogs seem to be bogged down in uniformed policies and simply aren’t thinking outside the box. Afraid to take on colorful personalities or step a bit outside of their company’s happenings, many corporate blogs employ an official tone announcing the play-by-play updates of company news. This is just one mistake that businesses are making in the blogging world.
There is a laundry list of issues that need to be addressed when it comes to improving corporate blogs, but here we’ve narrowed down the key elements that companies should focus on. Here are 10 tips for corporate bloggers hoping to make a positive splash in their communities.

10 corporate blogging tips
 
Tip nr 7. Get Social

Who will become the dominant social profile Facebook or google ?

A big battle is going on.


Facebook and Google are waging a bitter battle over data portability and the control of your identity on the web. Unfortunately, it’s a battle in which nobody will emerge as the victor, certainly not the millions of users who are now caught in the crossfire.

Last week, Google changed its terms of service so that anybody utilizing its Contacts API is required to reciprocate by exporting its contacts back to Google. In other words, if a company or social network wants to let users import their Gmail friends so their users can find their friends, then it has to allow for the same type of importing.
For most companies, this isn’t a problem, but there is a big company that doesn’t offer reciprocity: Facebook. The social network doesn’t allow Google users to import their Facebook contacts for products like Gmail, Buzz or Orkut. Thus, Google blocked Facebook’s access to its Contacts API.
That’s when things got interesting. Following Google’s decision to deny Facebook API access, Facebook decided to circumvent Google by giving users an easy option to download their Gmail contacts and then upload them to Facebook. As AOL’s TechCrunch notes, it’s essentially Facebook’s way of telling the search giant to go to hell.

Google and Facebook’s battle isn’t simply about any one company blocking access to data or acting juvenile; the stakes are nothing less than complete dominance of the web. As we’ve noted in the past, Google and Facebook are locked in a heated battle to become your default social profile. Whichever company controls identity on the web, controls the web.

Currently Facebook and Google dominate third-party sign-in options on the web, but Facebook’s growth as an identity platform has been ascending; more than 10,000 websites integrate with Facebook every day, thanks in no small part to the explosive growth of the Facebook Open Graph. Can you believe that Facebook’s “Like” button, now ubiquitous across the web, launched not even seven months ago?

Facebook has become so aggressive that Google has reacted with some big social moves of its own. It recently acquired Slide and Ångströ, reportedly for Google Me, the search giant’s rumored next attempt at competing with social networks. However, rumors are no longer focused on Google building a social network; many now believe the company is likely building more social features into all of its products.

Regardless of what exactly Google is building, it’s clear that Google is building something. And the reason they’re reacting so feverishly is because the world’s largest social network is increasing its control of the web. Google can’t afford for Facebook to control identity on the web, which is what prompted the change to the search giant’s terms of service in the first place.

Source:
Facebook vs Google

iPhone App Measures Your Happiness

Harvard researchers, using the iPhone to track people’s moods, have found a correlation between daydreaming and unhappiness.

The app, aptly named “Track Your Happiness,” contacts iPhone users at random times during the day to ask how they’re feeling and what they are doing while answering these questions. Users have the option to decide when and how often they’ll be notified.

The researchers’ findings, published in the journal Science, were based on samples from 2,250 adults. Out of those surveyed, 58.8% were male, and 73.9% of them reside in the U.S. The mean age of those involved in the survey was 34. As DISCOVER reports, responders said they were daydreaming 46.9% of the time when the iPhone rang to check in on their thoughts. And those who said they were daydreaming were more likely to reveal that they were feeling unhappy.

That said, Jonathan Schooler, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told The Boston Globe that the findings should not just be used to determine that a wandering mind is an unhappy one.

According to Schooler, mind-wandering is key for one’s problem solving abilities — and there is also evidence that it could be important for creativity.

iphone app measures your happines

Nielsen Admits Undercounting Web Traffic

Computer Glitch Caused System to Under Count Time Spent By 22%

by Michael Learmonth  Published: November 04, 2010

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The Nielsen Co. disclosed today it has been undercounting traffic to websites -- for at least the last three months -- due to a flaw in its system that failed to recognize long internet addresses, underestimating "time spent" on the internet and especially social-media sites.

On line metrics can be a tricky subject, as this news proves. Nielsen is generally very reliabe in measuring off line data. Maybe on line metrics was yet a bridge too far? Accountability with unreliable metrics will be a problem. The reaction of Nielsen is very good. Admit the problem, adress the problem, solve it and keep communicating with the audience. This issue will be temporarely dominate the agenda, bu I suspect it will not ave a ling term influence on Nielsen business..

Nielsen admits undercounting web traffic

Socialisation of brands

From Universal mccan The New Wace report. Based om 40.000 respondents. Full of statistics showing the importance and phenomenal growth of social media. Interesting read.

Wave 5 the socialisation of brands - report

View more presentations from Thorsten Linz.

I-pad users spent 20% of their time with it in bed

According to a survey of NPD, a consumer and retail market research organisation, among I-pad users. 20 percent of users’ time with the iPad was spent with it in bed, only slightly less than the 25 percent of time consumers spent with their iPad in a stationary surface mode, it is obvious that the iPad form factor makes people "feel warm and cuddly".
The NPD ipad research results


Nicolas Carr blog commented "One has to wonder what other sorts of activities are being displaced by the nocturnal stroking of the iPad's highly responsive screen."
Touch me