Andrew Curry writes:

We’ve just published our latest report on the post-recession consumer,  and the headlines are that although people are still concerned about the state of the economy, and are behaving cautiously as a result, there is less panic about the economic outlook than was shown in our previous research. But this is partly because people have changed their behaviour – the UK savings rate is now 8% (it was close to zero for most of the last decade, and even negative in 2008). As Futures Company Director Fran Walton said at the client launch, “People are building a buffer for what might lay ahead for them.”

A couple of insights from particular sectors are striking. The first is that people seem to have changed their grocery shopping behaviour – the proportion agreeing that ‘I am shopping at several shops to get the best prices, rather than doing one big shop at the supermarket’ increased from 22% to 36% between January 2009 and November, when the field research was done for the latest report. And there’s evidence that people are looking to spend less when they go out. There’s a more detailed summary of the data in WARC (subscription required).

News of the client launch event turned up in an unlikely place – Claire Myerscough’s Media Week in Brand Republic. She works for News International, and this was her take on the research:

Learn that consumers are still less trusting, with 53% worried about the price of petrol and 43% planning to spend less over the next 12 months. The mood of uncertainty is in line with our research: things have improved since this time last year but we are not out of the woods yet.

The Reconstructed Consumer is available as a paid-for report. For more information please contact Jennifer Childs on 020 7966 1824.

Last Thursday was something of a watershed for the UK government. Data.gov.uk was launched, becoming one of a growing number of government portals giving us access to reams of official government data. That might not sound terribly exciting, but for businesses and research organisations that use official and reliable information, the announcement may fundamentally change the way they operate.

Government data has traditionally been stored in departmental silos where it is difficult to access. Many aggregation sites, such as the ONS, are notoriously hard to navigate.

The Guardian has been campaigning for such an initiative for some time,  although its progress could only be described as incremental. In one of a number of articles on the site (you can find them here), they trace the birth of data.gov.uk to a comment made by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the world wide web, to the Prime Minister at a dinner for recipients of the Order of Merit:

“Gordon Brown said to me, ‘How should the UK make the best use of the internet?’ and I replied that the government should just put all of its data on it,” Berners-Lee recalled. “And he said ‘OK, let’s do it’.”

The site has been open to developers since October, in which time – without wanting to rely too heavily on one newspaper – The Guardian has created a portal which allows you to search for data from other ‘open government’ sources. It’s rather ambitiously called World Government Data, although currently supports only Anglophone countries. It mimics other efforts to combine official data from around the globe in an accessible way.

Why is this good news? Firstly, it seems only fair that taxpayers have access to information whose collection they have financed. Secondly, releasing such a vast body of data to the public enables a greater pool of talent to find ways to use it, in building new applications or finding new insight.

Ito World, for example, created some great visualisations using transport data . They were also responsible for this amazing video showing the edits made to OpenStreetMap over the course of 2008:

Greater access to data like this can have profound consequences. Members of the online mapping community scrambled together data from various sources to create an OpenStreetMap of Port-au-Prince that aid workers could use to help co-ordinate their efforts. Whilst their work was undoubtedly appreciated, it would have been made far easier with greater access. Here’s to Open Data.

The image above is used with kind permission of Jason Hawkes.

Andrew Curry writes:

The shape of the post-recession consumer landscape is becoming clearer. Our latest wave of Henley Planning for Consumer Change [PCC] research, launched to clients at recent breakfast meetings, maps this. The headline is that risk is back on the agenda, and as a result, consumers have found ways of living with uncertainty; they are looking for greater control; and they are considering the consequences of their choices.

Some of these changes were already becoming visible before the recession. As our UK Managing Director Will Galgey pointed out, it has been an accelerator rather than a catalyst.

For our UK business, the launch represents a return to selling an annual trends report containing analysis and data, which we last did in 2001. We’ve been able to do this because of the expertise of some of our Chapel Hill colleagues – formerly Yankelovich – in managing published services.

Some of the data in PCC are familiar. Obviously financial worries are on the up. Confidence in corporations has fallen – the proportion agreeing that “I can trust the following [sectors] to be honest and fair” has fallen across all commercial sectors, with utilities falling even faster than banks. But the research suggests that people are less rattled by the recession than they were a year ago, even though the economy is weaker now than it was then.

This has had some costs. People now feel under more time pressure than at any time since the late ’90s, though not for exactly the same reasons. And people’s desire for more control isn’t matched by their ability to achieve more control in their lives. 

The biggest impact seems to be on consumers’ willingness to make connections between their immediate surroundings and the wider world. 50% of the sample, of 2,500, thought it “very or fairly desirable” that “we won’t be able to consume as many goods and services as we have in the past”. 32% think it not at all or not very desirable, while 18% aren’t sure.

Similarly, nearly 60% now think we are at fault as individuals for environmental change – and around the same numbers think that it is both their responsibility to do something about it, and that doing something will make a difference.

From all of this, the Planning for Consumer Change data suggests strongly that new consumer values are emerging around vigilance, optimism, self-reliance, resourcefulness, connectedness, and prioritisation. This is a more complex world for brands to navigate, although the smart ones are doing it already. The good news, though, is that this offers more strategic options (and more interesting options) than a race to the bottom on price.

But as Director Henry Tucker observed at the breakfast sessions, “You’re probably not going to be able to sell the same old products to the same old consumers”. They’re expecting something from you which is more helpful – and demonstrates that you’re in tune with their new values.

For more information about accessing Planning for Consumer Change, please contact our UK Marketing and PR Manager, Jennifer Childs. The ‘era of consequences’ icon, seen at the top of the post, was designed by Tom Warren.

Rebecca Nash writes:

Segmentation is widely used in the private sector, to get closer to customers, to provide a language for understanding, and to create a framework to make the most of available resources. In the public sector, it can represent a powerful way both to prioritise customer insight and improve service delivery. Hence the reason that the IIPS (Institute for Insight in the Public Services, the co-venture between The Futures Company and BMRB) turned its attention to segmentation in its first breakfast briefing of the year, in particular as a tool for service transformation.

While planning the event we realised that, despite these benefits, some are put off by segmentation because of its specialist, technical jargon. But we also wanted to make the point that segmentation demands more than analytical skills – it also requires strategic and cultural awareness. A segmentation team needs to draw on a range of expertise to succeed, and the cultural challenges can be just as significant as technical ones.

In her presentation, IIPS Chair Michelle Harrison demystified the use of segmentation for those interested in better designing and embedding the method in their organisations but also emphasised that organisations must be clear about why they’re using segmentation. Sometimes it is not an appropriate insight tool and other methods will work better.

In the public sector there is growing recognition of the benefits of customer segmentations, but there are still concerns about equity (when some, not all, groups are targeted); the scale of public services (when your ‘customers’ are entire populations); and the analytical approximations that produce the segments (the boundaries of attitudinal and behavioural segments). But panellists from the Department for Schools, Children and Families (DCSF) and the Department of Health (DH) illuminated how segmentations that go beyond socio-demographic profiles are informing policy, interventions, marketing and communications, and how the government community is building up a body of best practice in this area.

The Futures Company will take another look at the technical and cultural challenges of segmentation, from the perspective of the private sector, when we host a breakfast briefing at our More London offices on 14 May. Please contact Jennifer.Kivett@thefuturescompany.com for more information.

Giles Powdrill writes:

Since 2004 The Futures Company has worked with Aviva, one of the world’s largest insurance companies, on an annual survey focussed on understanding consumer attitudes to saving and investing. In total, more than 100,000 people have taken part in the survey since its inception. Geographically, the scope has grown year on year from 11 countries in 2004 to the 25 covered in 2008.

2008’s global survey was also topped up by an additional omnibus survey of key tracking questions in six markets, to understand how attitudes were changing as the credit crisis intensified, in late October 2008.

The results formed the basis of a recent speech given by Amanda Mackenzie. Aviva’s Group Marketing Director, at Chatham House (opens in pdf). To summarise some of the main findings:

Short termism – In 2008, the majority of people surveyed, in every market, said that the short term (within the next 5 years) was the most important timescale for them when thinking about savings and investments and the importance of this short term context overall has been a growing trend since the survey began.

Financial vulnerability – People feel financially exposed. The 2008 survey revealed that across the markets surveyed only one in four people felt that they had enough savings or investments to cope with the unexpected. Although this sentiment was felt most strongly in many of the Central and Eastern European countries, the omnibus research in October showed that feelings of vulnerability in more economically mature countries like the US and Germany have increased noticeably over the preceding nine months.

Aversion to risk - Less than a third of those interviewed in 2008 agreed that they were prepared to accept a higher level of risk for their savings in return for a higher possible return and although this figure had remained consistent across the five years of core research, the omnibus survey showed evidence of this risk aversion strengthening in the more mature economies since the credit crunch took hold. The research has highlighted consistently that when people think about financial returns from their savings they tend to prefer products which offer safer or guaranteed options over those which offer the highest or most competitive returns.

Barriers to saving - The greatest reported barriers to saving more have consistently been lack of affordability and existing debts, however lack of trust in financial institutions as a determining factor has risen dramatically over the course of this year. For instance only 8% of respondents in the US cited it as a barrier in Q1 2008 but this had then risen to 25% by Q4. Over the same period it rose from 15% to 27% in Ireland and from 13% to 22% in the UK.

Retirement concern – In almost every country surveyed the majority of pre-retired people said that they were worried that they wouldn’t have enough money when they retire to provide an adequate standard of living, and this has been the case since the survey began. However, significantly fewer people in most countries said that they were actually regularly setting aside money for use in retirement (despite also acknowledging that saving or investing regularly was the most practical way to secure a comfortable retirement). A mismatch between anxiety and action which creates some potentially worrying pension provision gaps.

Working later – One response to this potential lack of retirement provision, from a consumer point of view at least, may lie in simply working until later in life. In fact, rather than seeing this an unappealing prospect, in 2008 the majority of pre-retired people agreed that they would like to work, either full time or part time, after the usual retirement age. There was considerable geographical variation in answering this question though; the more established Asian markets such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan expressed the greatest desire to carry on their employment into their later years whilst those in Continental Europe (France, Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium) were least enamoured with the idea.

Countries covered in the 2008 research: Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, China, Russia, Ireland, India, Australia, Romania, USA, Italy, Lithuania, Turkey, UK, Sri Lanka, Poland, Canada, Spain, Czech Rep, Malaysia, Hungary, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, France.

A summary report of the key findings from the research has now been published and is available for download on Aviva’s website.

Rebecca Nash writes:

‘Public facing’ and ‘academic’ are two personal attributes that often don’t go together. But the IIPS was fortunate to host this rare breed at a breakfast briefing this week. Professor Danny Dorling both conducts groundbreaking research on patterns of place and social change, and makes sure it gets covered by the media (here and here and here.)

Danny’s presentation at the IIPS was on the evidence of the strong links between poor public services and local inequalities – part of the IIPS’s ongoing conversation about what role research and public services play in improving people’s lives. Worrying as much of his evidence is, his talk was also a hopeful call to action. Despite the correlation between local deprivation and poor services he argued two points:  First, if we take a look at recent data from The Futures Company, there is public will for social change and social action – and permission for radical change. Second, government has the tools to improve things on local levels and to stop inequalities from continuing to spread on a national scale.

BMRB Social Research’s Head of Methods Joel Williams argued that research can support the policy and service delivery changes that Danny urges – and looked at some different research methods. He identified new research strategies for the places that most need them: for example, opening up administrative data bases in their original forms, targeting surveys in areas with the greatest variety of life outcomes, local authorities working together on common policy interventions, and more facilitation of local area modelling by those conducting national surveys.

Danny’s assumption that government could provide most of the solutions was challenged by Professor Paul Wiles, Head of Government Social Research. He raised questions about  the persistence of long-term, local inequalities, and the way in which these shaped long-term social and cultural perceptions of poorer areas. In short, there are limits to government power and policy making, especially in the face of other powerful agents of change (communities, families, the housing market, and more).

Big questions about government, community, and public and social capital at 8.30 in the morning. But as we only begin to see the effects of economic crash, these issues are only going to get sharper over the coming year – or more.

The picture shows Diego Rivera’s mural, ‘Contradictions between Rich and Poor 01″. Sheffield University’s ‘Changing UK’ report, co-authored by Danny Dorling, can be downloaded as a pdf from here. The IIPS is a co-venture between The Futures Company and BMRB which develops and promotes the use of citizen insight to support the transformation of public service delivery in the UK.

Alastair Morton writes:

The Guardian last Friday splashed pictures of baked beans and ‘Beamers’ across its front page to make the point that consumers’ habits are changing as a result of the credit crunch and other pressures on incomes. In particular, there are some startling statistics about BMW sales (down 40% on last year) and people’s levels of savings (down 48% on last year). In all of this, they suggest that a number of companies are benefiting from the ‘Aldi effect’, meaning that budget retailers and products (such as Aldi, Premier Inn budget hotels and own label foods) are more in demand as consumers tighten their belts.

However, the headline effects of downturn mask some more complex value trade-offs that consumers are making, and will continue to make, as they manage their squeezed finances. Over the last 5 years, discounters (especially Lidl) have added branded goods to their shelves, reaching levels as high as 30% of the product assortment in UK stores (sourced from MVI research). So switching to these retailers need not mean buying different products. Are consumers trading down and buying lower quality, or are they simply looking for the same quality, even branded, products at a cheaper price? Paul Foley, UK Managing Director of Aldi, argues ‘there is no trading down in buying the same quality product. You are just trading down in price.’

In ‘Feeling the Pinch’, a piece of research that we did recently, we were able to dive deeper and unpick the different ways that consumers are managing their money differently. Using a factor analysis, we found eight themes of coping behaviour that consumers are likely to draw on over the coming year, from spending wisely to borrowing to cutting back to reducing ethical consumption. Obviously there’s far more detail in the 70-page report, but a couple of core findings stand out.

First, people’s initial response to downturn is to try to buy the same things cheaper rather than buying fewer or different things. After this they buy less or cut out treats or luxuries. Secondly, levels of anxiety about economic downturn are a strong predictor of consumer behaviour – the more anxious consumers are, the more likely they are to make specific changes to their consumption behaviour in order to save money. Measuring consumers’ anxiety levels about their economic position – and how they’re changing – is the best way to gauge how rapidly consumer behaviour is likely to change.

The ‘Feeling the Pinch’ report is available for £3,500+VAT. Tailored briefings, which explore the findings and their implications for individual companies’ strategies and brands, are available from £6,000+VAT. To find out more, please email ftp@hchlv.com.

Andrew Curry writes:

Visiting the British Museum’s Hadrian exhibition on a wet Sunday in August isn’t perhaps the most sensible thing to do, although the exhibition is striking even when it’s teeming with visitors. But the trip was at least as educational about the BM’s approach to customer service.

While waiting to buy my timed tickets, the screens behind the ticket desk advertised to me the benefits of membership (‘Join today and see Hadrian free’). I had some time to do the sums, and it seemed like a reasonable offer. So when I reached the desk I asked if I could buy membership instead. Not here, apparently, but over there – at a desk with another long queue at it. Having waited several minutes already, I bought the ordinary one-day exhibition tickets instead. Lost revenue, lost relationship, from the Museum’s point of view. ‘It doesn’t seem sensible to advertise membership here and not to sell it’, I observed, helpfully. ‘I know’ said the woman at the counter. ‘We have mentioned it to the management’.

Being a wet Sunday, I had an umbrella with me. It had been pretty visible when I bought the tickets, since umbrellas aren’t the sort of thing you tend to hide unless you’re a hitman. When we got to the entrance of the Hadrian exhibition for our timed entry, 40 minutes later, the attendant told me that I couldn’t take the umbrella in; it would have to go to the cloakroom. ‘I could have been told that when I bought the tickets’ I pointed out, both to the attendant and later to the man in the Cloakroom. ‘I know’, said the man in the Cloakroom. ‘We’ve been telling the management for the last two exhibitions, but they haven’t done anything about it’.

Of course, the British Museum’s not unique in not listening to its customer-facing staff. Lots of organisations forget that they’re the first to hear (often the only people to hear) when their customer-facing systems aren’t entirely customer friendly. Usually managers are too busy telling their staff about new instructions to find the time to listen to them.

As for the Hadrian exhibition, it’s open until 26th October. But don’t go on a wet Sunday. And if you do, don’t take an umbrella.

Source: ICM/Guardian 2008

Andrew Curry writes:

One of the more interesting pieces of data to be published this month was the result of a Guardian/ICM poll which showed that a majority of UK adults thought that it was more important to deal with environmental issues than the economy. Interesting, because the notion that people always turn back to financial self-interest when times are tight is so ingrained that my first thought was that the poll must be wrong.

But maybe not. Looking at the poll through the lens of our 2007 Green Consumer Segmentation (summary here), there are high degrees of consistency. The segmentation generated five segments: two small activist groups (about 8% of the population); a larger group, ‘Positive Choosers’, representing 31% of the population, who were informed about ethical and environmental issues, and expected companies and organisations to act on them; a fourth segment, the ‘Conveniently Conscious (35%), who are environmentally and ethically informed, but don’t tend to act unless choices are framed from them; and finally a group of Onlookers (26%), who are unaware or sceptical. The point is that the top three groups are all more likely to prefer that the government tackles environmental issues – and so is some of the fourth group. From this perspective, the 52% figure seems completely plausible.

There were also strong degrees of consonance between the ICM research and our findings. For example, both pieces of research find that young people and older people had the highest levels of environmental concern (with a sag in the age cohorts between), that women had slightly higher levels of concern than men, that there was a poor correlation between socio-economic class and environmental concern, and that there were relatively few differences between different regions of the UK. With one notable exception: in the South east, Britain’s richest region, 52% say the economy matters most, compared to only 38% of Scots, perhaps more evidence to undermine the widely held idea that environmental concerns are a product of affluence.

And as it happens, the Green Consumer Segmentation has just won an Atticus award from our parent company, WPP, for being one of the best pieces of work in the area of ‘Market Research and Insights’ across the whole group worldwide last year. The Atticus competition, named for the Cretan storyteller, is designed to encourage and promote new thinking across the company. We’re delighted, obviously.

Andrew Curry writes:

You have to pinch yourself as you leaf through the current issue of Newsweek, which is on the impact of high oil prices as pump prices climb and analysts are entertaining the thought of the $200 barrel of oil. Even a year ago, the coverage would certainly have been doom laden, even apocalyptic. But the cover story is almost upbeat, as it decides that this spring marked the moment when America changed:

With average gas prices per gallon edging toward $4, America’s notoriously profligate ways started to change fast. Americans are driving less, using mass transit more, buying fewer gas guzzlers, indeed shopping less wantonly in general, and lowering their previously unshakable confidence as consumers. Suddenly, Americans are acting differently; if not exactly like Swedes, then not quite like themselves, either. It’s a shift that could change the world.

What’s interesting is that it isn’t just journalistic hyperbole. The latest data from America’s Department of Transportation shows that high gas prices are changing consumer behaviour. Estimates for March show that Americans drove 3.4% fewer vehicle miles this year – 11 billion miles – than last year. It’s the biggest year-on-year monthly fall ever seen in the US transport data, and to give a sense of scale, the last time the year-on-year March data tipped downwards Jimmy Carter was President. In fact, there’s been a general downward trend since last November. So it turns out that driving habits do respond to price signals provided the price signals are sharp enough and persistent enough. And this has good effects; one result has been that nine million fewer tonnes of greenhouse gases were discharged into the atmosphere in the first quarter of 2008.

And this also bears out one of the central findings of the recent report, Dollars and Consumer Sense, from our colleagues at Yankelovich, which looks at consumer trade-offs in the face of recession. Certainly consumers plan to cut costs, for example from buying at stores which have cheaper prices but a smaller product range, and by trading down on quality. But quite a lot of the trade offs reported in the research involve lower consumption, even less consumerism – delaying purchases, cutting back on food and gasoline, cooking from scratch instead of buying prepared foods, buying second-hand, and giving up ’shopping for fun’. Not exactly Sweden, at least not yet. But not exactly ‘shopping for America‘ either.

Thanks to Matt Cutts for the photo.

Update: Trendspoting, The Oil Drum has an account of the new American phenomenon of ‘hypermiling’ – or getting the maximum mileage per gallon from your vehicle. There’s even a website.