Alex Steer

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So, I've now landed in New York, picked myself up and rearranged the furniture. I've also, happily, started at my new place of work. All of which means my several weeks of nomadism are over and I really should get back to writing here again now that I have a reliable internet connection to play with. (Which, by the way, feels astonishingly fast after a year of variable-speed South African broadband. No wonder so many digital strategies feel so impossibly grand. Who knew it was this quick? I'd quite forgotten.)

I've been thinking about South Africa again today, though, and over the last couple of weeks on and off, as part of an interesting series of chats with various smart people on the subject of consumer research, and especially international consumer research. Yes, interesting consumer research. Really. Don't stop reading.

Still here? Good. This is the bit where I remind you that selling anything (products, ideas, political movements, etc.) is a lot easier if you understand what's interesting to the people you're trying to sell to, and that a good way to do this is to understand what they're doing and feeling, and listen to what they're saying. Unlike the physics of jet propulsion, this is not rocket science. Unlike being hit by a rocket, it's not surprising, either.

But it's surprisingly easy to assume that understanding comes as a result of collecting the answers to lots of questions. So, if you make chocolate bars and you want to sell more chocolate bars in China, you might ask lots of Chinese people what they like and don't like about chocolate, how often they shop and how much spare change they have in their pockets, how concerned they are about their teeth rotting, etc. And voila, suddenly you have all the answers you need to develop your low-cost extra-cocoa sugar-free chocolate bar on the public and brief your ad agency to do a big brand campaign and some point-of-stale stuff to drive foot traffic in petrol stations and hypermarkets. Job done; thank you, consumer research.

And then the international cocoa trade collapses, and a set of draconian anti-snacking laws are passed, and peak oil shuts the petrol stations, and you've gone from Green and Blacks to black and blue.

Or, failing that rather drastic scenario, your target consumers don't change their opinions, and the macro-scale context of chocolate-bar making doesn't alter overnight. But you launch your chocolate bar, and after the launch the sales growth is a bit disappointing. You lie awake at night wondering why your bar isn't doing as well as its equivalents in the US and Great Britain. And only after a while do you notice that there's been a long-term shift, and most of China's spending power is not in the hands of the chocolate-loving old guard but in the wallets of a new generation of bubblegum-chewers who have no historical reason to find mashed-up cocoa beans interesting at all.

You realise that you either asked the wrong questions, or you asked the wrong people.

Which brings me back round to South Africa, a country where a lot of market research has started to learn that it's been asking the wrong people for much of the last ten years.

Marketers being pretty on the ball, they noticed in the mid to late 1980s that share of national spending power was gradually shifting away from rich urban white people. They identified a new segment of young, well-off black (and coloured, in the Western Cape) people whose interests and attitudes in the marketplace were different from those of the traditional consumer base. This piece from Time, back in 1988, was one of the earler pieces of international coverage of what came to be known as the 'Black Diamond' segment - young, black, upwardly-mobile, and a huge business opportunity.

Fast forward to the present and the black diamonds are ubiquitous in marketing. Cars, financial services, premium beer, you name it - pick a mainstream consumer category and you'll find ads full of aspirational young black men and women doing whatever young aspirational people do in ads. (Standing in posh bars laughing politely, mostly, or wearing suits.) In twenty years South Africa has moved from the point where no brands targeted the new black middle class to one where so many do that it's often hard to tell their ads apart. It's almost, but not quite, become an industry gag.

But here's the problem. While brands are still doing research, developing products and commissioning campaigns to target black diamond consumers, this is a story about South Africa that's twenty years old. That doesn't make it untrue or irrelevant. It's just incomplete. To put it very crudely, the story still goes that South Africa has shifted from having one major consumer segment ('rich whites') to having two ('rich whites', 'black diamonds'). A lot of consumer segmentations you see in South Africa still have this as their underlying logic, surprisingly. 'Black Diamond' is also pretty much the only story about the post-apartheid consumer landscape that's known outside South Africa, so it tends to be used as a lens for analysis whenever South Africa is compared with other emerging markets such as the BRICs.

In other words, a lot of consumer research is asking yesterday's questions, designed for yesterday's people. In South Africa now, the really interesting story is not the emergence of the small 'black diamond' segment, but the emergence of the mass market - the huge middle-income consumer base of black and coloured people who are well on their way to controlling the bulk of day-to-day purchasing power in the country, and whose circumstances, attitudes and behaviours make them very different from either traditional consumers or the fabulous but few black diamonds. Brands and marketers are rushing to catch up with this new market that's emerging within their own country. Most international research, which typically does like-for-like comparison of consumers in different markets, is still missing the existence of mass-market groups like this in many different countries, by assuming that below certain income thresholds one doesn't count as a 'consumer'. Brands' scramble for South Africa's new consumers is evidence that the 'global middle class' does not consist of a few hundred thousand newly-wealthy Indians or Nigerians, but of hundreds of millions of people coming in their wake, and bringing their money, votes and preferences with them to the marketplace.

Surprise.

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There's a good short piece in by Ratan Malli in this month's Admap (subscription required). Called 'Passive Chinese', the gist of it is that 'Chinese consumers are brand-loyal because they are reluctant to try something new, not because they actively love the incumbents'.

The article runs through some of the reasons for this, most of which boil down to reassurance. China is the land of dodgy brands. For years this has been a bit of a badge of pride: there's even a fake brand mall in Nanjing, apparently. But Chinese shoppers are starting to get nervous about the downside of the laissez-faire approach to product safety, what with the melamine-contaminated baby milk deaths and the Sprite mercury poisoning affair. So big, established brands represent a lower risk of you turning green and keeling over.

I have two slight queries about the article. The first is that it implies a sort of Chinese exceptionalism, comparing China to Taiwan, Korea and Japan. For the region, I think it's right, but the explosive growth of consumerism happening in China is better compared with what's happening in Africa right now, not with China's better-developed neighbours. The analysis rings true for a lot of African countries, where freewheeling consumerism and the relative novelty of packaged goods is also leading to worries about safety. Big brands benefit because they represent marks of trustworthiness, but that means they have to work hard to make sure their products are consistently high-quality and to combat the booming market for fake branded goods. If you're a brand trading in the South African mass market, for example, the anti-illicit drive is not just about protecting intellectual property, it's about stopping fake products from killing people in your name.

The other slight query is with the assumption that the natural driver of brand loyalty is love. ('Chinese consumers are brand-loyal because they are reluctant to try something new, not because they actively love the incumbents.') I'm a bit sceptical about this implication in an otherwise great piece. Brand love, let's be honest, is a slightly unnatural state compared to brand trust. The kind of lifestyle identification (etc.) that forms the basis of 'love' for brands only really means anything when your potential customers are safe and secure enough that they can devote time to wondering which brand of bathroom cleaner says most about them as a person. For markets where most consumers are a fair way down Maslow's hierarchy, the idea of actively loving a brand can seem a bit far-fetched.

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On the tube (underground, not television) last night, I saw the print version of this:

Yes, Brita water filters are now, at last, available in five colours. And you can go to their website and vote for your favourite.

Let me stop you there, Brita.

You have obviously been told by someone that consumers (which is what people in marketing call people) are desperate to interact with brands. You may have been pointed towards successful examples of fun promotions which make use of a voting mechanic, such as Walkers' rather brilliant Do Us A Flavour campaign from a couple of years back. This has presumably led you to the inescapable conclusion that everyone is going to have a point of view on the colours of your water filters, and will be so glad of the opportunity to make their preference known to the world. That's how you generate brand love, isn't it?

And who knows, maybe you're planning to showcase the winner in some sort of ad campaign, maybe with glowing testimonials from its superfans. That way you'd have ticked the box for 'user-generated content' too.

What may have escaped your notice, though, is that you sell water filters.

Water filters, for heaven's sake. It's hard enough to believe that anyone would really bother voting for their favourite-coloured water filter if they happened to stumble across the website. The idea that someone would feel strongly enough that they would see a billboard ad, make a mental note of the website, and sit down at the end of the day to exercise their democratic right to choose purple over orange is... stupid.

If you want to do market research, hire a market research firm, and if you want to advertise, advertise. Don't crash the two together under the spurious banner of consumer engagement. I can't imagine how much that must have cost to produce such a boring, insulting campaign. (Effectively, the message is, 'You will vote for anything; vote for this'.) A similar budget could, one imagines, have brought to life an interesting, creative campaign that would have stuck in people's minds, rather than a feeble lead-generating promo like this. And if you don't think you can be creative with the idea of 'our products come in different colours', I refer you to Dulux's Colours That Go campaign.

Brita's not the only offender in the 'rubbish consumer engagement' category. Pantene is playing the user-generated content game at the moment with its Make A Swisssh campaign, where you can show how much you love the Pantene brand by, erm, uploading photos of yourself... swishing your hair around...

Listen, Pantene, and every other marketer out there who thinks we're all desperate to get involved in the creation of branded content. We have jobs, and lives, and limited time, and we do those jobs to earn money, and in our limited time we go out to shops and hand over money for your products.

Do not expect that we will fall over ourselves to make your ads for you as well.

Unless, of course, the experience is exceptionally rewarding. It's No Picnic was brilliant because the basic concept was hilarious, and people got the chance to end up on TV. This isn't: it's just a feeble and slightly demeaning prize draw.

Put some effort in. Make your own ads. And make them good.

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Updated 4 November 2013: Posterous.com no longer exists, so the WPP Marketing Fellowship blog is offline. Since this post still gets a fair bit of traffic (thanks!), I've updated the link to point to the copy of the post on the Internet Archive. If you're applying for the Fellowship, good luck. If you have questions about the process, feel free to get in touch with me.

Since I know a few people who are interested in the WPP Marketing Fellowship have stumbled across this blog, let me point you towards my post on the application process at the WPP Fellowship blog.

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Another on-the-fly post, this time on the rising popularity of rent-don't-buy initiatives from everything from transport (Zipcar et al.) to handbags. I've read a few articles lately claiming more strongly than usual that this trend represents a shift towards a less materialistic mindset, especially among young urbanites in rich developed countries. Like most trends emergent among young urbanites in rich developed countries, it gets a lot of attention from marketers, especially because it carries with it the lingering prospect of manufacturers selling less stuff.

I'm a bit sceptical, though, I'll be honest. Okay, attitudinal shifts happen for a reason, not usually in isolation from economic conditions, but I wonder if there's genuinely any other driver behind rent-don't-buy than infrastructural improvement.

In South Africa, trains are rubbish and buses are worse. As a result, if you can afford a car, you drive everywhere. There are a lot of terrible cars on the roads, often held together with little more than gaffer tape and hope. For that infrastructural reason cars are status symbols, so SA comes crazily high up the international ranking of luxury car sales.

Killing the culture of the car in the rich suburbs of Cape Town or Pretoria would take a massive change to the infrastructure of transport. More high-class Gautrains, fewer life-in-your-hands minibus rides. Something to make cars less necessary, and so stop the next generation of kids from riding round in their dads' old bangers, dreaming of Maseratis and Mercedes. Something to make having any car, let alone a posh one, a bit less explicable.

In other words, exactly what's happened in London or New York.

Rent-don't-buy happens when societies get so good at building infrastructure to solve problems that individual control of solutions becomes less necessary. The trains are good, so why own a car? Online ordering and courier services are good, so why buy a Hermes bag when you can borrow one for a bit? Good infrastructure formalises the arrangements engineered informally in communities. You used to borrow a bag off a friend, now you borrow one off a stranger (and so get exactly the one you want).

But that's not post-materialism, even if it's post-ownership behaviour. In fact it's a harmonisation of materialism at the level of the infrastructure. Being a member of Zipcar means implicitly agreeing with thousands of other people on a collective definition of what is desirable in a car: saying that Zipcar's fleet is good enough. And, because the materialist infrastructure is so advanced, it probably is good enough. We can have access to what we desire when we need it without paying over the odds. Thanks, infrastructure.

Ownership isn't dead. Firstly, there's real risk of over-generalising the habits of the infrastructurally rich. In the rest of the world product/service networks are less reliable and less trusted, and ownership has huge and growing cachet. Bling is king in many emerging markets, and you can expect demand for pretty much every kind of manufactured good to rise explosively over the next decade. And that's not even to mention rural areas.

But secondly, even in the rich old markets, cases for ownership can still be made and made strongly (a good sign that materialism isn't going anywhere). Look at the growth of consumer electronics, a largely selfish category where having your own kit (in the latest model) confers real beneit and cachet. I'd be surprised to see iPad-sharing taking off, for example. Even in categories thoroughly colonised by sharing, such as luxury bags, there's room to build value in ownership. If I were trying to help a super-luxury handbag brand fight erosion from rental schemes, I might start by asking people about the value of heirlooms.

That's all for now. I'm blogging on an iPod, so sorry for any hideous big-fingered typos.

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This is one of those posts on the run I promised I'd try to do. I'm back in the UK for a bit now. My weekends are a bit unpredictable and will probably involve dashing hither and yon to see family and friends, but happily I'll be in the London offices of The Futures Company on workdays between Wednesday 8th and Friday 17th September, catching up with people and projects before heading out to the NY office.

One of the pleasures of all this travelling is the chance to chat without distractions to a certain other planner for eleven hours or so on long-haul flights. And yes, I'm afraid we do sometimes talk shop, which generates better thoughts and ideas than I suspect either of us would have alone.

Probably our best conversation along these lines was about the 'death of the web' idea. In particular, about the tension between still-growing web traffic and the web's loss of share of internet use. This led to a good dissection of what counted as 'web' and what didn't, with both of us querying the assertion/assumption made in the infamous Wired piece that content served in semantically-rich XML within subscriber-only platforms doesn't count as part of the web. Restricting the web to what is searchable seems rather forced, and only really serves to make sense of Wired's claim that closed networks exist as attempts to take on a Google hegemony. (By this logic, building 'walled gardens' is an act of rebellion, as well as control.)

For my money, if it has hyperlinks, is accessible over an internet connection within a browser and is reasonably device-independent (loose definition, I know), it's the web. So I see Facebook and post-paywall Times articles as absolutely a part of the web, but not Kindle eBooks or iPhone apps - though these often mirror the web or share content with it more than a little. (I'd be happy to have my definitions pushed a bit here if anyone fancies an argument.)

The 'web' vs 'rest of internet' debate is interesting but a distraction, we decided, somewhere over the Atlantic. More meaningful is the whole issue of how we discover content online and what signposts we use to get to it. By that token, search is growing, but so too are non-search-based discovery methods, especially recommendation.

Thinking about our own browsing habits and how they've developed over the last few years, we realised we both rely more and more on what we called 'nodes' to direct us to content for entertainment. We follow links from people on Facebook and Twitter, or within news websites we enjoy, or from blogs we read to ones we might like. This is the 'internet balkanisation' problem in microcosm: we like the nodes because they help us find content that resonates with us; and the more of that content we take in, the more we agree with (and like, and trust) the nodes.

On the other hand, we're the kind of people Google all day for information at work. Search, not recommendation, is our default whenever we actually need to know something.

This led us to a couple of thoughts about the current rage for social recommendation as a media tool - the deftly-placed 'three of your Facebook friends bought this t-shirt' message. We wondered about the cases where it would work best, and worst. The thought we came down to is that recommendations based on social graphs are likely to be less useful than those based on shared behaviour around well-defined nodes.

Here's a thought experiment. There are tube strikes looming in London at the moment. You normally take the District Line to work, and one day it's announced that the line will be closed. Are you more likely to take advice on an alternative route from your best friend and housemate who takes a completely different route to his office, or from a fellow commuter whom you don't really know very well but who always takes the same tube train as you, or from the underground station manager? I'd pick the manager, because alternative route planning is largely a matter of fact (and of decisions based firmly on facts). This is the equivalent of Googling something you need to know quickly. If that failed, I'd ask the fellow commuter. Only if he were unavailable would I ask my friend, probably with little confidence of getting a really savvy answer.

It seemed to us that friendship-based recommendation is inherently perilous in matters of taste as well as matters of fact. For example, I like reading, and so do some of my friends, but there are very few from whom I'd take book recommendations, because I know that our tastes differ. I probably would take a recommendation from a stranger who I knew had also bought and read a lot of the same books as I had. That's why Amazon's 'People who bought this also bought' feature would win out, for me, over a 'Your friends bought' equivalent.

Which made us wonder what the role for friendship-based recommendations in marketing is. And we thought, maybe it's for going beyond fact and detailed taste into that territory where preferences are expressed seemingly at random, as between otherwise highly commoditised brands. This got us onto a slight diversion about the extent to which people really respond in detail to all the complicated lifestyle/aspiration/etc. cues which advertisers think are built into their brand communications, and whether those cues actually function quite basically, to say to people 'this beer/car/music is/isn't for people like you', and then let word-of-mouth and social network effects between friends and peers do the rest.

Got to run again now, so will leave it at that half-developed thought. More on this later, maybe. Closing questions: how do you work out whether to recommend (and so plan digital media) based on behaviour or the social graph? How do you make use of trust in nodes, like you do trust in friends, so as to give behavioural targeting the same kind of emotionally connective kick as as friendship-based recommendation?

I'll pick this one up later...

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This blog may go a bit quiet for a little while, as I leave Cape Town (and my agency) and head for the UK (for a fortnight), France (for a week), then New York (more permanently). I'll do my best to post on the run, but we'll see.

Meanwhile, I'll leave this thought here, from Harold Love (1993) Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England:

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By the way, the stats tool on this blog has completely fallen to bits, so I have no idea whether anyone has been reading this blog for the past several months. If you do, feel free to say hello in the comments to this post (or via email or Twitter, come to that)! Especially if you blog, tweet, or otherwise insert words into the internet.

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A stray conversation brought up this thought: are people who work in marketing unusually anxious about how digital they are?

I'm using digital in all the common range of ways: technologically adept, internet savvy, well-informed concerning (especially) social media technologies. As for anxious... well, if you work in marketing, or spend time with marketing people, you know what I mean. We seem to be obsessed with how digital we are. This can either mean we become the trainspotters-cum-trendspotters of the web, endlessly going on about (what we think are) bleeding-edge internet technologies, or it can mean we make a point of how unconcerned we are with the latest fads, which can itself become a sort of self-preservation mechanism, a sign that we're aware that the rest of the industry is pretty concerned with digital fashion.

Okay, we've found ways to be smart about it. Most of us know now that 'doing some digital' or 'being on Facebook' is a recipe for rubbish. But that doesn't stop us from obsessing about the channel, rather than the stuff that goes on it, as if we were saying, quick, let's do some television. (Actually, that happens.) We know the content we make has to be good (but of course we all think the stuf we do is good)...

Though stop there. Because I've just fallen for the same old trick. By describing the web as a channel for content I'm thinking about it like a media person, like a marketer. I'm obsessing. If I were feeling a bit Nike, I might dust myself off and say, stop worrying. Just do it.

But then again, without the media hat on, I remember that the internet doesn't feel like a channel when I use it. It's not like TV or the radio, or even like telephones or the postal system. Those are all media with which I have occasional interactions. The web's different. It's just this thing that's part of life now. I know how to live online. It's not a big deal.

Sometimes when I talk to marketing people about the web, I think, can't you just give it a rest? Why don't you stop talking about content and engagement and channels and user-generated content and crowdsourcing and touchpoints? Why can't you think about the web like the rest of us do?

Why can't you just get it?

I don't turn up at your house and talk endlessly about your fixtures and fittings. I don't meet you down the pub and tell you exactly what you're wearing, down to the last detail. Because that would be weird, wouldn't it? Just like it's weird to those of us who grew up online when you come along and you obviously haven't the first clue, not how all the bits and pieces work, but how it feels to use them without thinking. You remind us of those chimps in the PG Tips ads: almost like us, but somehow not quite right, like you might topple over any moment, or do something crazy.

Honestly, it's like speaking French. I understand French grammar and have a decent vocabulary, and I can read books and newspaper articles pretty well, but I've never taken the time to live in France, or attend conversation classes, or do any of the hard work that's needed to be really, genuinely fluent. That's why I'll never be able to wander into any French bar and start a conversation with someone, even though I can ask for directions and order food.

If you haven't put in the hard work of using it a lot (for stuff other than the odd bit of Googling and office emails), you don't really understand the web. Don't assume that because you work in marketing that you understand how to be online. You'll just end up standing on street corners, shouting 'OU EST LA PISCINE?'

And if you do actually get it, if you're one of those people that cares, don't pretend you don't. Just because you work in marketing doesn't mean you have to stop being a human being and start with all the engagementy consumery channel-blather between 9 and 5. If you've been using Facebook since 2005 and Twitter since 2007, chances are you know the rules of good behaviour and interestingness, just like you know the rules for generating sentences in your native language. You can spot the online equivalent of malformed utterances just like that. Don't pretend otherwise: don't offer spurious marketing-land justifications for not pursuing web marketing ideas, if the real reason not to do it is that you know, as an ordinary web user, that they're just terrible, boring ideas.

There are no short cuts here, and there shouldn't really be any leniency. If for some reason you want to spend your time on this earth helping products and services get people's attention online, learn how to do it well. That doesn't mean swapping case studies with other marketers. It means getting the social life of the web. It is like learning a language. There are lots of people who can help and advise you and stop you going horribly wrong, but unless you take time and take an interest there's only so much they can help you. C'est la vie, as they say.

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So, Wired has decided that the web is dead, despite all the very good evidence to the contrary, and is rightly being pasted up the wall as a result. As has been pointed out (not least in the above-linked NYT piece), what the web is, now, is huge. Which is not exactly new news.

What interests me, though, and what I feel might have triggered the ill-judged Wired piece, is that the web now feels huge.

Here's what I mean. If you're as old as me in geek years (like dog years, but more curmudgeonly), and especially if you're slightly older, you'll remember that web is short for World Wide Web, and that it's an abstraction based on a common set of protocols for the transfer of files across the internet. The idea of a worldwide web was only really interesting because, before it, computer networks were distinctly tribal.

The web was for finding stuff more than it was for doing things. The environments in which we did things with computers were far more local. Even when I was an undergraduate, in the early 2000s, I logged into one machine on my university's network to read mail, another to store files and read newsgroups, and so on. If I wanted to put anything on the web, I had a place to do that: a folder on that same filestore machine which was visible to the web. If I wanted people outside the network to be able to find one of my files, it would go into that folder and become visible at http://my.network.url/~myusername. Just as importantly, there were ways of putting up content that were only visible to others on the network: local shared folders, .plan files, etc.

Now the web is our operating environment - it's where we do things, not just where we find things. One of the actions that has shifted most firmly onto the web (as opposed to the internet) in recent years is communication with other people. It's helped collapse the distinction between publishing and communicating. Twitter, Facebook and the like have mixed parentage - email and instant messaging on the one side, personal web pages and .plan files on the other - though some of the offspring can be ugly, as Google Buzz found to its cost.

The world of tribal networking gave way to the world of social networking, and in many ways this has made both publishing and communication (and their hybrids) more accessible and easier. What I've said is just the old Web 2.0 conversation, except that this conversation is normally had in terms of its impact on media. You know: power to the people, breaking down barriers, empowering consumers, consolidating personal branding, etc.; the rhetoric of the hot, flat and crowded world of the social web.

The mounting online privacy debate offers just one perspective on the downside. As tribal networking on computer networks has become social networking on the web, we have lost control over the size of our societies.

Now that we all use the same online platforms, and especially as the divisions even between these begin to dissolve through the use of persistent online identities, we feel exposed to the huge, undifferentiated vastness of the internet. This may help us iron out some of our quirks (flaming, lying on CVs, drunken pics on Facebook), but it's pretty scary. I remember when Facebook moved from being a set of networks for college students and alumni and became, in effect, a completely different entity. As it becomes increasingly co-extensive with the web, it is losing any sense of social network-ness, becoming instead a global publishing platform within which fairly strong social network effects operate: i.e., you only read the profiles and updates of people you (vaguely) know in the real world. Only the vigilance of users concerned about privacy prevents Facebook from being almost completely open now.

Now we are waking up and realising that, oh, the online world we're forced to live in is huge. We have lived through the web's small equivalent of the Highland Clearances. Now here we are, blinking in the harsh light of the third-largest country in the world.

I'm not nostalgic for the technologies of the tribal internet. (Some were good and still are; others were clunky.) Nor am I purely concerned by privacy in the strict sense. But I am aware of the lack of replacement for the cosiness of the small worlds of the internet. These small worlds could easily have been replicated on the net, but as yet they have not been.

There are a few weak signals that they may yet return. The Facebook privacy issue is one. The emergence of Diaspora, the build-it-yourself peer-to-peer social network, is another. When it launched, it was touted as a possible Facebook killer, then slammed because of the need to set it up and maintain it yourself. In fact, I think the time and effort required to set up a Diaspora node will make it more appealing to those that want to recapture some smallness, localness and plurality in their web-based interactions.