The Comley Report
2012: The year of social products
At the end of last year, I blogged about some of the ways companies are leveraging social tools to help consumers connect and share with one another. Since then, additional examples of brands adapting to the My Crowd trend have caught my attention.
- Kobo Vox is an e-reading device. Once again, its USP is social: it connects users with others reading the same book to discuss it, and they can share reading lists with others through social networking sites. Reviewers haven’t been kind to the Kobo Vox, so we might never see it trumping Amazon’s Kindle, but the social element is intriguing.
- Stelios Haji-Ioannou, founder of easyJet has teamed up with Brent Hoberman, founder of lastminute.com to launch a car sharing business, planned for spring 2012. The venture will allow private car owners to rent out their vehicles when they aren’t in use. The scheme could offer a cheaper alternative to traditional car rental organisations – who have to purchase cars to be rented and pay maintenance costs – so it could prove popular in the current economic climate.
- Hao Di Loa, a restaurant chain, has installed telepresence screens in their Shanghai and Beijing restaurants in a trend called ‘social eating’. Essentially, video-conferencing with food, the screens allow customers to connect with and share their meal with friends and family who are located elsewhere in the world.
What’s intriguing about all of these launches is that social media is integral, not just to the marketing of the product, but to the product itself.
Cliqing with the crowd at Christmas
The My Crowd trend is driven by the ability of consumers to connect and share. Most brands have adopted social media strategies in response to this development. But, as we highlighted in the report, it is not necessarily easy for brands to work with this trend.
Since writing the report, however, I’ve been drawn to a couple of successful examples:
- Cliq, which was launched in the US in the late summer of this year. Cliq is one of the sites that helps users decide where to eat, what to buy and what to do based on the opinion of their social network. Users enter the name of the restaurant, business, product or place and Cliq will show which friends have visited, written reviews for or given recommendations. The challenge here is for the service suppliers in terms of the implications of the reviews, etc.
- As we all know, choosing the right gifts at Christmas can be a headache. Retailers have tried to make gifting easier for consumers for many years, without ever really finding the right way to marry up recommendation technology and inventory management. So I was interested to see Walmart’s most recent effort: Shopycat. The app provides gift suggestions for Facebook friends based on data taken from their profiles, while providing links through to purchasing the item. Users can ‘like’ items, share suggestions, make wish-lists, and all the usual ingredients of the social experience. A bit like the Ikea bedroom initiative I highlighted in my October blog piece, it’s not without flaws and limitations, but a nice seasonal example of how the MyCrowd trend can be leveraged.
And with that, Happy Christmas!
Ikea adds a touch of the personal
As highlighted in my report, the MySelf trend is leading to an increasing personalisation of products. With this in mind, one development that caught my eye was Ikea’s personalised 3D showroom on YouTube. The interactive tool draws on data from Facebook and creates a bespoke 3D bedroom.
Customers are shown their perfect room by visiting www.youtube.com/IKEAUK. The tool pulls in data from Facebook to show pictures of friends and family on the wall. The concept was developed based on data from a UK-wide study of over 2 million Britons that sought to understand how people live life at home.
I really like this concept of integrating brands with people’s lives. All the items highlighted in your ‘personalised bedroom’ are available for purchase at Ikea’s online store. A key benefit is that you don’t have to spend an hour circumnavigating a massive warehouse showroom to find it – dovetailing nicely with the MyTime trend.
PS: Intel ran a similar exercise with the Museum of Me, an app that pulled in a person’s pictures from their Facebook profile to create a virtual museum.
Won't somebody please think of the children!
Unicef and Ipsos Mori published a report recently highlighting the difficulties faced by UK parents in finding time to spend with their children and how, after long hours at work, they try to compensate by buying the latest toys and branded products.
Research is a profession notorious for its time demands and I’m sure many parents reading this would be able to identify with the report’s findings. The anguish – and the guilt-driven purchases that result – are part and parcel of the ‘My Time’ trend.
As consumers are less able to allocate time to their friends and family, they will make compensatory purchases elsewhere. But what opportunities does this open up to marketeers? As phenomena such as widespread smartphone ownership and social media adoption change the ways we can interact, can brands do more to:
- Facilitate getting together in different ways – can we create new spaces and occasions for parents and children to interact?
- Ensure that compensatory activity like gift buying is as meaningful and valued by both parties as possible
- Find ways to ‘buy back time’ for parents – witness recent examples inviting consumers to find better ways to shop for groceries, hire a car or find car insurance
Time pressures and the distancing effect this can create within families aren’t going away. For brands, that may be no bad thing.
Time-saving brands
In the past month or so, it’s been interesting to present and talk with clients about how key consumer trends are affecting them. The trend I call ‘My Time’ (more here) is all about consumer’s desire to reduce complexity in their lives. It’s not difficult to find examples of brands that are trying to tap into this. Love it or hate it, Swiftcover has gone for the jugular with their Iggy Pop campaign message – ‘car insurance quote in 60 seconds’.
Another example has been the recent ‘Husband’ TV ad from the Co-operative. This is where the ‘husband’ talks to the camera, addressing his ‘wife’. He declares that he ‘doesn’t want to do that massive weekly shop anymore’ and ‘be stuck in a traffic jam’ (on the way to the supermarket). Instead, he wants to spend time enjoying life with his wife and kids.
The Co-op ad perfectly complements the ‘My Time’ trend. It engages on an emotional level, tapping into people’s desire for a simpler life, where time with family and friends is valued above everything else. And it positions the Co-operative, with its network of community based stores, as the shopping destination that saves time by offering ‘great food within easy reach’.
I believe the ‘My Time’ trend will continue to gain momentum, especially as it is underpinned by basic human needs and motivations that drive feelings of happiness. In particular, in uncertain economic times, the need for a feeling of connectedness with friends and family is heightened. Brands that understand that need, and offer a helping hand in freeing up time to allow it to be satisfied, should benefit.
Pricing is such a precarious business
As highlighted in my report, the consumer is becoming more and more canny. They know when and how to buy – and this makes it a really precarious business for brands and retailers.
With this in mind, my eye was drawn to recent commentary in the Economist about Carrefour, the huge French grocery retailer. They’ve warned that operating profits for the first six months of the year would fall by 23%, mainly due to an abysmal performance in French hypermarkets (France accounts for 44% of the group’s sales).
The company has had to admit to a big mistake on pricing. This year Carrefour passed on commodity-price rises to consumers several months before its rivals, such as Leclerc and Intermarché. Canny shoppers objected and Carrefour lost market share. As Carrefour is the world’s second biggest retailer, it should have the clout to cut prices by more and for longer than any other supermarket chain in France. But that might displease the markets and shareholders, as short-term profits would suffer. Some of its rivals are privately owned, and so feel less short-term pressure to perform. A precarious situation indeed.
This example raises serious issues for companies and brands. Not only do prices rise for consumers, but for companies too. Consumers have been used to being protected from such direct price increases. As these rises are more and more transparent to customers, the question is how to manage these rises.
I provide some thoughts in the first edition of my report that brands and retailers need to consider with this trend – which I call ‘MyPrice’ – in mind. This example has made me consider a few more:
- What role does honest engagement have to play? A really tricky one, but I feel brands really need to consider how to develop relationships with consumers.
- Focusing the offer on key strengths. As I understand it, Carrefour is doing exactly this, by piloting stores that are more focused on the grocery offer.
- Adding peripheral value to your offer at the same time such as experiential elements. Once again a tough one with consumers seemingly less loyal and more price focused.
In the next section of my report I will talk about how brands need to act as ‘butlers’. I believe it is approaches such as these that will engender a new style of loyalty. Check back next week.
Picking up where we left off
It’s been a good few weeks since I wrote the ‘Money matters’ article and it’s really interesting to revisit it, given the somewhat sad developments in the high street. We’ve seen Focus DIY, Jane Norman, Homeform and Habitat all go into administration and Mothercare announce that it’s to close a quarter of its stores – all examples of retailers who occupied the ‘squeezed middle ground’ I described.
The other interesting bit of data to come out the other week was that UK households have seen the biggest fall in disposable income for more than 30 years.
We all know our economy was put onto a life support system three years ago, and these facts just provide further evidence that we’re very much still in the intensive care unit.
Retailers are finding it particularly tough as they grapple with already low demand and increased pressures on their costs. The longer this goes on, the more it will have an enduring impact on consumers’ attitudes and behaviour – in turn shaping the way we work with them as researchers.
