Posts filed under ‘economics’
Making markets for buyers
Trevor Harvey writes:
Springwise has an item this week on a new initiative (opens to Dutch web page) in the Netherlands whereby ING – one of the country’s largest banks – helps buyers makes offers for other people’s homes – even through the houses aren’t actually on the market. There have been similar schemes elsewhere.
They see it as further evidence that we’re moving towards Doc Searls‘ ‘intention economy‘, which is more interested in what buyers would like to buy rather than what producers want to sell. It’s an interesting idea, and since buyers are likely to have the money it cuts out a lot of marketing effort. But before we rush to declare a new dawn, there are some wrinkles. It seems to me that it opens up some privacy concerns – or even just straight nuisance calls; how long before there is a register akin to the Mail Preference Service for people who decline to be approached in this way? Most contract law, certainly in the UK, is based on sellers making an offer to which a buyer accedes. And the notion of the market seems deeply embedded in cultures throughout the world. There may be good social reasons why – for 10,000 years or so – the dominant sales model has been of sellers gathering their wares and buyers going to find them.
28 February 2008 at 6:48 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Influential Boomers
Siân Davies writes:
Henley Centre HeadlightVision is just embarking on a merger with the US research company Yankelovich – the market leaders in understanding the changing values and behaviours of US consumers.
While we’ve been negotiating I’ve had the good fortune to immerse myself in much of their research. One publication which stood out for me was ‘Generation Ageless‘, by J Walker Smith and Ann Clurman, Yankelovich’s leading commentators on generational marketing. Yankelovich coined the term ‘baby boomers’ in the 1960s when they first started collecting data on this influential generation. As Walker and Ann say: “Without notice or warning, in defiance of all trends and expectations, Baby Boomers exploded onto the American scene, and in the process changed everything”.
It’s not about the money any more
Brian Chien writes:
In an article for the latest edition of the Royal Mail’s Contact magazine, we looked at how modern consumer currencies go way beyond money. Sparked by some recent examples of free marketing in the television and music sectors, including Radiohead’s latest album (initially, but no longer downloadable at the price the user chose to pay), we noted that even when such transactions don’t involve cash they still take both time and energy . Consumers understand that there’s no such thing as “free” marketing, so how should worth be measured?
We tested this against our database of attitudes on five user “currencies” – Information, Time, Energy, Money, and Space (ITEMS) – and found that 38% of UK consumers rated Time as the most valuable of the five currencies, while 30% believed Energy to be most precious. Which prompts a question: how much do marketers know about how their consumers juggle between currencies?
The attitude-behaviour gap on debt
Gemma Stevenson writes:
The scale of consumer debt in this country is now pretty well-known – whether it’s the £1,000 million of mortgage debt or the fact that overall consumer indebtedness now exceeds annual national income. But one of the big surprises for me when I attended a breakfast briefing we ran for public sector clients today was how people feel about it.
Research data shows that between 2002 and 2007 the number of people agreeing with the statement “I am happy to have short term debt to allow me to buy the things I want” fell from 43% to 32% – a clear and significant shift in consumer attitudes. (Click on ther thumbnail above to see the chart). Yet the question raised on Wednesday was ‘when will this lead to a change in behaviour?’ This doesn’t seem to have happened yet, despite the attitudinal data. Yet at the same time, there are ‘weak signals‘ of change out there, such as the relatively rapid rise of local freecycle groups.
One thought that emerged from the discussion was that the debt conundrum had similarities with public health issues such as obesity: that providers had to change their behaviour, perhaps nudged along by regulators, before consumer behaviour starts to change in line with underlying attitudes.
India is now outsourcing outsourcing
Brian writes:
The New York Times recently reported that India is now outsourcing outsourcing- a number of large Indian companies are hiring workers and opening offices not only in developing countries, but even in Northern American cities in some cases. The looping of outsourcing back to the developed West where average costs of supplies and wages are much higher can be mind-boggling as it appears to be counter-intuitive to the conventional wisdom of cost minimization. But large companies like India’s Infosys Technolgies and Wipro are thinking beyond just wages and cost reductions. By gaining a comparative advantage in managing labor flows across continents, these companies are thriving to be “global matchmakers in outsourcing,” accumulating human capital that are crucial in serving local and specific knowledge to distant markets and clients.
The report illustrates the phenomenon but using an example of a company in the United States paying an Indian vendor 7,000 miles away to supply it with Mexican engineers working just 150 miles south of the US border. Now, outsiders may find it absurd for the company to outsource so far away for a service that is so close to home, but if the Indian firm can render the same service effectively at the equivalent or cheaper prices, then this transaction goes to show the lessening in importance of physical distance for many global service-based industries. With today’s communication capabilities, the world is perhaps flatter than we once thought. After all, nothing can really be that surprising in the world of outsourcing after that one Californian newspaper outsourced two journalists in India for reporting local news in fair Pasadena.
3 October 2007 at 2:52 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
