Early detection of changes in consumer behaviour by monitoring nutrition buzz ?

I have the impression that most people do not often talk about average fruit or vegetables like oranges, banana's or potatoes. Unless they are somehow asked by a food manufacturer to give their opinion.

Large food multinationals are always interested in the latest food trends among consumers. What are consumers talking about on the social media ? Sanoma and Unilever have their social platform Yunomi (http://www.yunomi.nl/) where they try to get women to talk about all kinds of products. With 280.000 women quite succesfull for a Dutch social platform.

Nielsen has chosen a different path to better understand emerging trends in nutrition, The market research company has been quantifying buzz among health enthusiasts, a passionate and informed consumer segment that Nielsen monitors across 400+ social networks, key blogs and forums. Below you can find a table of their findings.

Can you really detect in an early stage a change in consumer behaviour by monitoring the nutrition buzz on social media ?

Nielsen believes that listening to what health enthusiasts care about helps to see what’s next.
For average Europeans who know that unprocessed fresh fruit is the best option watching these statistics it is like a watching an artificial TV contest about who is the winning exotic fruit or vegetable of Q1. In Q2 the ranking can be completely different. Some entertaiment value but wether it does provide relevant consumer insight or spotting relevant food trends in an early stage remains the questions.

Source:
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/state-of-the-consumer-wellness-watch-nutrition-buzz/

More and more screens are competing for the attention of the consumer

Àlways wanted to know where other people have gaming consoles in their house. Nielsen did some interesting market research and made a nice infographic.

Because all the screens in the house compete for attention of the consumer it would be interesting to see where other devices like televisons, pc´s, laptops and tablets are located. It is a nice illustration of the connected consumer but the media channels through which a marketeer can reach the consumer become ever more fragmented.
Finding the right media channel mix for your offer is a more and more difficult marketing challenge.

Source:
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/u-s-console-gaming-the-living-room-beyond/

Women are the biggest online shoppers

My students sometimes have the impression that men do most of the online shopping. This might have been the case in the early days of the internet. But nowadays Internet mirrors society and proof of stereotypes about men and woman and old and young can effortlessly be found on the internet.

The Nielsen market research company shows that women are the most frequent shoppers online in the USA. Only the category computer hardware remains a dominant male bastion.



All the old stereotypes still hold true: women shop the most, senior citizens watch the most TV, men play video games and women and the young like to text. I assume this is also true for European countries, but I have not found any data to confirm this.

The Nielsen USA report summary with data from Q3 2010 is interesting stuff to read and can be found here
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/in-u-s-men-are-shopping-more-than-ever-while-women-are-watching-more-tv/#

Farewell facebook

The growth of facebook is fenomenal. The use of facebook in our daily life has something articicial. In my daily work as a lecturer i see that some students are afraid to pick up the phone or to talk real life to somebody else. This briljant short movie illustrates the alienating effect of facebook.

Marketeers should be aware of these effects and the added value of being connected artificially.

Banner blindness

Today I came across an relatively old study (2007) but stil very relevant. It shows why Search Engine Marketing is not too effective and click through ratios are usually very low.

The most prominent result from the new eyetracking studies is not actually new. We simply confirmed for the umpteenth time that banner blindness is real. Users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it's actually an ad. (Indeed, banner blindness is moving beyond the online realm, for example into ballot design.)

On hundreds of pages, users didn't fixate on ads. The following heatmaps show three examples that cover a range of user engagement with the content: quick scanning, partial reading, and thorough reading. Scanning is more common than reading, but users will sometimes dig into an article if they really care about it.



Heatmaps from eyetracking studies: The areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn't attract any fixations. Green boxes were drawn on top of the images after the study to highlight the advertisements.

The following video clips show a gaze replay of one user's eye movements while looking for advice on how to invest for retirement. (The moving blue dot shows where the user is looking.) The page contains an ad for retirement accounts at Fidelity Investments, a site that offers good advice on the target topic and might therefore help users who click the ad.

Video advertising-fixation-gaze-replay  (.wmv)
Regular-speed gaze replay (19-second video, Windows Media format, 0.6 MB)

Video advertising-fixation-slowmotion (.wmv)
•Slow-motion gaze replay (1-minute video, Windows Media format, 2.2 MB)

As the replay shows, the user did fixate once within the ad, but at that moment, the ad is obscured by a pull-down menu. In reality, the user couldn't see the message; the fixation was clearly a mistake that occurred while she was trying to reacquire the menu after briefly looking away from the screen. All of this occurs so quickly that you probably need to review the slow-motion replay to follow the action. (This is typical for eyetracking: the eye moves so fast that our best insights come from watching slow-motion replays.)

Smart advertisers should therefore be looking at other ways to engage the consumer.

Original post: Banner Blindness old and new findings

BannerBlindness.pdf

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

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

The Dirt on Laundry Trends Around the World

Unilever, P&G, Henkel Adjust Products to Suit Cultural Preferences -- and Washing Temperatures

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) -- Every half hour 7 million people in the world wash their clothes with Unilever products, and 6 million of them do so by hand.

That rather jarring statistic, courtesy of Unilever Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Keith Weed, helps explain Unilever's exit from North American laundry a few years ago: The biggest growth markets are where people are dreaming of moving up from hand washing to their first hand-cranked or semi-automatic washing machine, or are looking for lower-suds products or rinse additives that will let them make fewer or shorter trips to the well or river.

......
 
'Nintendo kids'

Europe is embroiled in a new sort of cold war as the major laundry players launch a range of products promising better performance from cold-water washing, most recently Procter & Gamble Co.'s Ariel gel with Actilift. By contrast, in India, P&G and Unilever are in more of a hot war combining price cuts and competitive advertising claims, with both sides having had to pare back or scrap ads under court order in recent months.

Marketers do seek to capitalize on some global trends and attitudes, such as a preference for strong floral fragrances that spans southern Europe, Latin America and Asian markets. But even in broad trends, the world is often moving in opposite directions at once. For example, most people in the U.S. and northern Europe prefer lighter fragrances their southern peers would find too watered down -- or as having no scent at all.

In developing markets, the combination of warm temperatures, sweat and heavy physical labor create a need for powerful washing and stain removal, with much of the power supplied by elbow grease. Compare that to the U.S., where Eric Schwartz, VP-laundry marketing for Henkel U.S., identifies a segment he calls "Nintendo Kids." They're the growing number of youths who spend more time indoors playing video games than outdoors getting grass and ground-in dirt stains that generate challenging laundry problems.

For those challenges, Unilever markets four of its regional brands -- Persil, Skip, Via and Omo -- under a common "Dirt is Good" logo and positioning. For more premium brands, dirt is indeed good, but it's also good for kids, as Randy Quinn, exec VP global laundry for Unilever sees it.

"The proposition is based on the fundamental insight that giving children the ability to get dirty and experience life as part of the growing up process is healthy for their development and gives moms the freedom to say, 'I can let my children get dirty without worrying about whether I can get clothes clean,'" he said.
.... more


Posted by Jack Neff on 06.14.10

From: http://adage.com/globalnews/article?article_id=144398