New Trends in Consumer Technology: Snapchat

No Comment

Without a CNN Headline News or other of the same ilk offered by my satellite TV provider, I often turn to Euronews for a quick overview of major news stories.  It does the job for the most part, but I often get infuriated by a regular feature they've dubbed 'No Comment,' which involves showing striking video footage without any off-screen commentary.  In other words, don't ask us, you figure it out. 

Here's how Euronews explains No Comment:

Well, that's peachy.  It's good to respect the intelligence of your audience, but images are not 'facts.'  Images can deceive, especially when details and context are eliminated.  Essentially, the viewer is left with the awareness, for example, that there was a pretty bad catastrophe someplace in the world - an out-of-control fire, a devastating environmental disaster, a street riot, or some other tragedy - without any of the details that journalists are supposed to be paid and trained to tell us (who, what, why, where, etc.). Imagine this conversation:  Honey, what's that you're watching?  Uhm, a story about a really bad fire somewhere, caused by who knows what, with any number of victims - your guess is as good as mine.

On second thought, forget about that conversation.  After all, who needs conversation when all you need to do is use your Snapchat app to take a temporary photo of the screen, which you can then send to whomever it is who may have phoned or texted you asking what you're watching on TV.  In the Euronews case, the photo meta-communicates the answer with a 'no comment' about a 'no comment.'  However surreal this may sound, this scenario is not only plausible, it already exists.  Snapchat, the pioneer iPhone and Android app in temporary image communication, has been around for a while now and is already enormously popular.  Snapchat allows a person to take a photo, send the image to a designated recipient, and control how long it is visible by the person who receives it, up to 10 seconds. After that, the picture disappears and can’t be seen again.  Talk about the ephemeral essence of photography.  On second thought, don't - no, don't speak - just snap and send.  What a misnomer, Snapchat, because in essence, its more appropriate name is Snapchatless.

That's the problem with Twitter . . . too chatty.  140 characters, waaay too many.  In fact, images sent by mobile phones continue to rise as text messages continue to fall.  CTIA, the trade association for the wireless industry reported that in the US in 2012, 2.19 trillion text messages had been sent and received - 5% less than the preceding year.  By contrast, MMS (multimedia) messages including photos and videos rose by 41% in 2012 to 74.5 billion.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about the shift from verbal communication to visual nods.  Visual messaging breaks down language barriers, if not cultural differences in message interpretation.  True, if I take a photo of a pizza I am eating and Snapchat it, I doubt it will make a difference if I am sharing it with an Italian or an Aleut, but in other cases the image may be less straightforward.  What bothers me most about conversing by photo is a growing aversion to true verbal dialogue, debate, conversation.  Call me old-fashioned, but I love words.  On the other hand, as a student of photography, I remember fondly sitting in the classroom of Italian art historian James A. Fasinelli, the person most responsible for turning me on to cinema and photography.  Fasinelli would take an entire class session discussing the narrative messages conveyed by a single frame of a film like Juliet of the Spirits or Citizen Kane.  We are a visual species and it is likely more natural for people to read an image than to read and understand text.  Or maybe I'm only thinking about those apparently vacant Snapchat models like the ones you see at the top of this post.

Nonetheless, a new reality, according to Harvard photography professor Robin Kelsey, is that 'this is a watershed time where we are moving away from photography as a way of recording and storing a past moment' and are instead 'turning photography into a communication medium.'  But who is to say that these two kinds of photography can't coexist?  In the meantime, visual conversing just keeps getting bigger.  Over 300 million images are shared daily on Facebook (that's 100 billion photos per year), and WhatsApp (a messaging platform where people can share photos, videos, or audio notes), Vine (Twitter's 60-second video-sharing app), Flickr, Instagram
and Snapchat are thriving.  Just don't tell anyone about it.

Milgram Returns - The Obedience Experiments 50 Years Later

A bit off the beaten path of marketing and consumer behavior issues, I can't help but signal a rapidly-approaching seminal event: the 2013 Obedience to Authority Conference, which will take place from August 6-8 in Bracebridge, Canada, two hours from
Toronto in the Muskoka lake-district of Ontario, Canada.  Co-convener Nestar Russell and his team have lined up 50 international panelists and presenters to discuss 50 years of rumination, debate, implications, and replications of Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments.   The full program is available here, headlined by keynote speaker, Thomas Blass, Milgram's biographer who also happened to have been my social psychology professor at the University of Maryland during the early 1970s.  It was in that class that I first learned of the obedience project and I have written extensively about it during ensuing decades, particularly in my research ethics books.  Blass will give a talk entitled “The impact of the obedience experiments on contemporary culture and thought.”

Milgram may be better known among consumer behavior researchers for his small world concept, which gave rise to the '6 degrees of separation' notion (both discussed in detail in my book, Connecting With Consumers as well as Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point). But Milgram's deceptive research design has informed much discussion in the consumer behavior literature regarding the appropriateness of informed consent violations in research with human participants.  Among the general public, the most disconcerting aspect of the research, which involved the bogus delivery of electric shocks to a hapless victim under the guise of a learning experiment, is what it revealed about ourselves: that people are capable of inflicting extreme, potentially deadly punishment on innocent victims if compelled to do so by an authority figure. The implications of the findings for understanding apparently incomprehensible atrocities ranging from the Holocaust to Abu Ghraib have kept the research salient in our collective consciousness across five decades, and so it is no wonder that the impending conference has generated a great degree of interest.

Given the various ethical strictures that are now in place in most research institutions, it has become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for researchers to conduct Milgram-type experiments in the contemporary context.  Yet researchers have become quite ingenious in terms of developing alternative methodologies to study obedience-related questions, such as the use of virtual testing using avatars as opposed to real-life apparent 'victims.'

I myself never met Milgram, although a couple of my Temple University grad school professors knew him well and admired him greatly.  According to one, Milgram was torn over the ethical criticisms of his work and believed that people just wouldn't let the issues rest and concentrate on his subsequent work.  Think what you will of his obedience experiments, Milgram was a ground-breaking pioneer in the field of social psychology, greatly respected by his students and peers.  I won't be able to attend the conference, but Nestar Russell informed me that there is a chance they will publish something afterwards and perhaps even stream some key talks from the conference.  I'll keep you posted if developments warrant.

 Additional Reading:

Kimmel, A. J.  Deception in psychological research: A necessary evil?  The Psychologist, August 2011.

Blass, T.  The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram.  Basic Books, 2007.

Also check out Prof. Blass's website: http://www.stanleymilgram.com/

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Advertising . . .

. . . or that can fit into one infographic.  For short attention spans only.

Source:  Ambassador

Blush and Edward Snowdon: What's So Funny About Peace, Love, and Privacy?

Rather than focus on the serious implications surrounding NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden's current plight, German luxury brand Blush has decided to exploit the funny implications of governmental domestic eavesdropping and surveillance.  Snowden, as is now well known, is the former Booz Allen employee and National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who leaked classified (NSA) documents detailing the NSA threats to Americans' constitutional rights to free speech, association, and privacy.  Whether you believe Snowden is a patriot or a traitor, I think we can all agree that these concerns are no laughing matters.  

Blush, on the other hand, wants you to like their brand and buy their lingerie.  So, haha, all this domestic spying stuff (and an on-the-run 30-year-old fugitive seeking asylum) is nothing more than fodder for underwear humor, as evidenced by the recent print campaign, courtesy of Berlin-based firm Glow.

 

 

'Uncover' - get it?  Or as Mashable puts it, a pretty juvenile play on words.

The campaign is reinforced on Blush's Facebook page.

 Blush isn't the only firm exploiting the NSA scandal.  The American restaurant (I use that term loosely) chain Denny's also sees the humor potential inherent in domestic data collection.

Who's the next bottom dweller to jump on the bandwagon?

Consumers Like Matching Brands

No, this isn't a promotion for Tostitos.  If you were to ask me which nacho chips and salsa sauce to consume, and I'm not sure why you ever would, I know I wouldn't recommend national brands like Tostitos.  As for salsa sauce, I prefer to make my own from scratch and would be happy to pass along a recipe.  But we're not here for recipes, we're here to better understand the psyche and behavior of consumers, and that's where the nachos example comes in handy.

As it turns out, based on a series of experiments conducted at the University of Minnesota (USA), researchers have found that when people consume certain products in tanden - such as nacho chips and salsa sauce - they enjoy the products more if the brands match.  So if you were to snack on, say, a bag of Tostitos nacho chips and Old El Paso salsa sauce while watching a televised football game, you wouldn't enjoy the snack as much as had the chips and sauce brands matched (such as Tostitos chips and sauce or Old El Paso chips and sauce).  Similarly, we might imagine that you would say your burger was tastier had the ketchup and pickles brands matched.

As to why matching brand labels lead to greater enjoyment, the researchers suggest that they encourage consumers "to believe that the products were tested and designed to go well together."

There is no universal answer to which brand a consumer likes the most.  The brand a consumer prefers for a particular product depends on the brand of other products with which it is being combined.  A company that offers products that are consumed together will have an advantage over other rival brands that do not offer both individual products, since consumers will want to have matching brands.

So now you know why many of the recipes - there I go again - on food packages tend to include certain ingredients that bear the same brand as the purchased item - often obscure or hard-to-find ingredients that only the brand offers.

Another comment regarding the nachos and salsa - based on simple learning principles, such as classical conditioning - if you find you are always munching on the same snack every time you watch a football game, you've probably trained yourself to associate these things.  And if your team wins, you'll probably enjoy your chips and dip even better.

One final nachos point - if you find the Tostitos logo particularly memorable or likeable, it could be because of the embedded image of two happy consumers (well, I don't really know how happy they are) - the two 't's in the center of the brand name - holding a giant nacho chip over a bowl of salsa sauce - the dotted part of the letter 'i'.  For the sake of closure (although this example is more consistent with the perceptual principle of figure-ground than closure) let's just assume the chip and salsa are both Tostitos, and that the consumers are happy.

Source : Ryan Rahinel and Josepth P. Redden. Brands as Product Coordinators: Matching Brands Make Joint Consumption Experiences More Enjoyable. Journal of Consumer Research, April 2013.

More Evidence That Marketing Kills

According to new research published in the online only journal BMJ Open, the more teens are exposed to tobacco ads, the more likely they are to take up smoking.  In short, marketing kills.

In their paper, "From never to daily smoking in 30 months: The predictive value of tobacco and non-tobacco advertising exposure," a research team led by Matthis Morgenstern described how they monitored more than 1300 young German non-smokers aged 10 to 15 years old in terms of their exposure to ads over a 2.5 year period.  Specifically, the adolescents were asked how often they had seen images promoting popular cigarette brands in Germany as well as for other non-tobacco products, such as chocolate, clothes, mobile phones, and cars.  They were questioned again 30 months later and asked how many cigarettes they smoked to date and whether they had become regular smokers. You ain't going to like the results, but given the title of this post, you can probably guess what the researchers found:

• One in three kids (406) admitted to having tried smoking during the 30 month period
• One in 20 (66)  said they had smoked more than 100 cigarettes (and thus can be classified as    established smokers)
• A similar proportion (58) said they now smoked every day
• The greater the exposure to tobacco ads, the greater was the likelihood that the teen would take up smoking
• Among various factors linked to the kids taking up smoking, smoking among peers proved the strongest influence, followed closely by exposure to tobacco ads.

Summing up their findings, the researchers claim that tobacco ads really do persuade teens to take up smoking, with every 10 sightings boosting the risk by almost 40 per cent.  One caveat that undermines these findings is the fact a large proportion of the original 2300 students involved in the research dropped out.  Thus, it could be there was something else at play that influenced the results relative to the nature of the people who remained in the study.

Source:   Matthis Morgenstern, James D Sargent, Barbara Isensee, Reiner Hanewinkel. From never to daily smoking in 30 months: the predictive value of tobacco and non-tobacco advertising exposure. BMJ Open, 2013 DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2013-002907

The results of the German research remind me of a series of studies that appeared in the December 1999 issue of the Journal of the American Marketing Association, which provided much fuel for the fire during the litigation against the tobacco industry around that time.  According to one study, after the launch of RJ Reynold's Joe Camel campaign to promote Camel cigarettes, 33% (86 out of 261) of 13-19 year old smokers smoked Camel compared to 8.7% (8 out of 92) 21 and up adult smokers, and the younger group reported much higher exposure, awareness, and liking for the cool Joe ads.  Less than 1% of the young smokers smoked Camels prior to the J.C. campaign.  By the way, if you are a teen reader, don't look at the ad to the left - I don't want to be held responsible for any nasty habit you may acquire.  Is it me, or is smoking oh so 20th century?
 

Maybe it's me, but I just don't get the fascination for blowing smoke, but this is an orally-fixated world we live in.  I guess people need something to do when they're not gabbing away on their new teddy bears (aka the mobile phone).  As for 21st century smoking, there have been some interesting articles of late in The New York Times on the newly emerging human foible known as 'vaping' - that is, the consumption of electronic cigarettes.  Although there is evidence that the e-cigs effectively cut into rates of smoking traditional nicotine sticks, government officials are doing what they can to restrict their availability and consumption.  The more things change . . .

Further Reading:

You can find my earlier post on e-cigs here.

Fischer PM, Schwartz MP, Richards JW, Jr, Goldstein AO, Rojas TH. Brand logo recognition by children aged 3 to 6 years. Mickey Mouse and Old Joe the Camel. JAMA. 1991 Dec 11;266(22):3145–3148.

A tool to quit smoking has some unlikely critics.  (7 Nov. 2011)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/science/e-cigarettes-help-smokers-quit-but-they-have-some-unlikely-critics.html?_r=0

E-cigarettes are in vogue and at a crossroads.  (12 June 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/science/e-cigarettes-help-smokers-quit-but-they-have-some-unlikely-critics.html?_r=0

You Are What You Eat

After an 8-month hiatus, I'm back, now dedicated to regularly maintaining this site with a general focus on new insights into consumer behavior.  My earlier posts are still available at my original connectingwithconsumers site.

By now, I hope you've read my book, Psychological Foundations of Marketing.  If so, you might think you now know everything there is to know about the psychology of consumers, but I am afraid you would be sadly mistaken.  Only the tip of the iceberg.  What better place to re-start to fathom the depths of consumer behavior than to look at some recent findings linked to gluttony.

If You Watch a Lot of TV, Your Children Are Probably Fat

I've long been intrigued, as have many others, with the effects of heavy TV viewing on our fragile minds and bodies.  And researchers have long pointed out how ill those effects may be.  About 100 years ago when I was pursuing my PhD in Philadelphia, I became engrossed by the ideas of Sol Worth and George Gerbner, two communication theorists whose writings I compared for a project assigned by one of my professors at the time, Richard Chalfen, author of Photogaffes.  Gerbner's enculturation research demonstrated how heavy viewers (i.e., more than 4 hours/day) perceived the dangers and risks of everyday life as closer to the world depicted on TV than in real life: compared with light TV viewers (i.e., 2 or fewer hours/day), they overestimated the amount and likelihood of violent crimes, believed they were more at risk to be a victim of a violent crime, overestimated the number of persons employed in law enforcement occupations, and so on.  More recently, my friend LJ Shrum and his colleagues found similar effects in terms of consumers' views about materialism and worldly possessions, such that heavy TV viewers believed they owned fewer nice things than the typical consumer, and their perceptions of the material world (e.g., goods and products possessed by the average homeowner) were more akin to how these things were depicted on TV than in reality.  In short, the researchers found that heavy consumption of TV leads to materialism and decreased life satisfaction. 

Which brings us to gluttony.  University of Michigan researchers Kristen Harrison and Mericarmen Peralta wanted to take this line of research a step further by asking whether heavy household consumption of commercial TV (as opposed to commercial-free digitally recorded TV, etc. that is less apt to air a lot of food advertising) leads to altered perceptions of what makes for a healthy meal and greater junk food consumption.   The researchers interviewed  US parents and preschoolers to determine how family characteristics (such as child and parent media exposure and child dietary intake) were linked to children's eating behavior and perceptions of what comprised a healthy meal.

To make a long story short, their expectations were confirmed: heavy commercial TV consumption led to more junk food consumption by the parents and their children had distorted views of what constituted a healthy meal.  Imagine how this might work - the parents are vegetating all night long in front of the boob tube, consuming - in addition to bags of potato chips, chocolates, beer, etc. - commercial after commercial for all the crap marketers are trying to get you to wolf down at uncontrollable rates, like potato chips, chocolates, beer, etc.  The next morning, little Billy sits down at the breakfast table, and Mom and Dad encourage him to eat his heaping bowl of overly sugared chocolate cereal by suggesting how if he does so, he will grow up to be 'big and strong' like Batman or whatever inane role model the kid idolizes.  'And don't forget to eat your double cheeseburger at lunch, Billy - it's good for you.'

What's particularly scary about this research is that Harrison and Peralta found these effects in preschoolers.  Prior research had confirmed the existence of a link between child TV viewing and obesity in childhood, but the new study may be the first to shed light on the development of ideas about healthy meals in the preschool years.  According to Harrison:

Even though parents and other caregivers are the primary gatekeepers regarding young children's food intake, children are still learning about food as it relates to health from family, media, and other sources, and may use this knowledge later on to inform their decisions when parents or other adults aren't there to supervise them.The preschool years are especially important, because the adiposity rebound in kids who grow up to be normal weight tends to be around age 5 or 6, whereas for kids to grow up to be obese, it happens closer to 3.  We need to know as much as we can about the factors that encourage obesogenic eating during the preschool years, even if that eating doesn't manifest as obesity until the child is older.

Source: International Communication Association (2013, June 6). Parents with heavy TV viewing more likely to feed children junk food. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 11, 2013, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2013/06/130606101724.htm

Further reading:
E. J. Boyland, J. A. Harrold, T. C. Kirkham, C. Corker, J. Cuddy, D. Evans, T. M. Dovey, C. L. Lawton, J. E. Blundell, J. C. G. Halford. Food Commercials Increase Preference for Energy-Dense Foods, Particularly in Children Who Watch More Television. Pediatrics, 2011.

University of California - Los Angeles (2010, February 10). Childhood obesity: It's not the amount of TV, it's the number of junk food commercials. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 11, 2013, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2010/02/100209095753.htm 

If You Spend All Day Texting and Gabbing on Your Mobile Phone, It's No Wonder You're a Dummy

It's a mean old world for the little ones - dangers lie at every corner, or more likely, with each new technology.  Afraid your kids will become obese if they watch too much commercial TV, you might encourage them to stick to their portable devices.  But research recently conducted at the Miriam Hospital's Centers for Behavioral and Preventive Medicine in Providence, Rhode Island found a link between texting, Internet and social networking activities and poorer academic performance.  This research involved female university students who reported their daily use of 11 different forms of media, including TV, social networking, talking on the mobile phone, texting, video game playing etc. Media use in general was associated with lower grade point averages and other negative academic outcomes, whereas more time spent reading newspapers and listening to music were linked to positive academic performance.  No wonder I did so well in school, back when I was reading 4 newspapers a day, constantly listening to music, and the Internet and portable devices hadn't yet been invented.

Source:  The journal Emerging Adulthood.


 Nobody Believes a Fat Doctor

I just can't resist mentioning a couple other recent studies on gluttony and obesity.  Here's one that caught my eye, a Johns Hopkins University survey of nearly 400 adults, asking how credible a physician would be who is either normal weight, overweight, or a blimp.  On a 5-point scale (with 5 being the highest credibility level), trust levels came out as follows:  4.0 for a normal-weight physician, 3.4 for an overweight physician, and 3.3 for an obese physician.  Similarly, likelihood of following the physician's advice declined as the physician's weight increased (3.9, 3.5, and 3.5, respectively).  What I find particularly interesting in these results is the lack of statistical difference between the overweight and obese categories.  In others words, as soon as your doctor noticeably gains weight, you'll probably find him or her to be less believable, blimp or not.

Source:  International Journal of Obesity

But . . . If You Are Fat, Your Doctor Won't Care About You

Finally, also coming out of the Johns Hopkins research labs, an investigation involving 39 primary-care physicians and 208 of their patients found that physicians were more likely to express empathy, concern, and understanding with normal weight patients than with overweight and obese ones.  Fortunately for the weight-challenged patients, this link did not carry over to the quantity of physicians' medical questions, medical advice, counseling or treatment regimen discussions.  Hey, but who goes to the doctor's to make new friends anyway?

Source:  The journal Obesity.

Don't forget . . . more postings at my previous site, http://www.connectingwithconsumers.net