Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends - Hardcover

Lindstrom, Martin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1250080681 ISBN 13: 9781250080684

Verlag: St Martins Pr, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Martin Lindstrom, a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, harnesses the power of “small data” in his quest to discover the next big thing

Hired by the world's leading brands to find out what makes their customers tick, Martin Lindstrom spends 300 nights a year in strangers’ homes, carefully observing every detail in order to uncover their hidden desires, and, ultimately, the clues to a multi-million dollar product.

Lindstrom connects the dots in this globetrotting narrative that will enthrall enterprising marketers, as well as anyone with a curiosity about the endless variations of human behavior. You’ll learn…

• How a noise reduction headset at 35,000 feet led to the creation of Pepsi’s new trademarked signature sound.
• How a worn down sneaker discovered in the home of an 11-year-old German boy led to LEGO’s incredible turnaround.
• How a magnet found on a fridge in Siberia resulted in a U.S. supermarket revolution.
• How a toy stuffed bear in a girl’s bedroom helped revolutionize a fashion retailer’s 1,000 stores in 20 different countries.
• How an ordinary bracelet helped Jenny Craig increase customer loyalty by 159% in less than a year.
• How the ergonomic layout of a car dashboard led to the redesign of the Roomba vacuum.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MARTIN LINDSTROM is a foremost consultant to a who's who of leading companies. He is the author of the international bestseller, Buyology, and five other books on branding and consumer behavior. In 2009, Time Magazine recognized him as among the top 100 Most Influential People in The World, and this year, an independent study among 30,000 marketers named him the world's number #1 brand building expert.

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Small Data

The Tiny Clues that Uncover Huge Trends

By Martin Lindstrom

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2016 Martin Lindstrom
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-250-08068-4

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Foreword by Chip Heath, 
Introduction, 
1: Fanning Desire: How Siberian Refrigerator Doors and a Saudi Arabian Mall Created a Revolutionary Website for Russian Women, 
2: Sausage, Chicken and the Pursuit of Real Happiness: Transforming the Future of How We Shop for Food, 
3: The United Colors of India: Selling Breakfast Cereal to Two Generations of Warring Women, 
4: Getting a Bead on Weight Loss (with Help from Fast Food, a Middle Eastern Movie Theater and a Hotel Lap Pool), 
5: How Horses, Shirt Collars and Religious Belief Helped Recarbonate a Struggling Brazilian Beer, 
6: The Case of the Missing Hand Cream: How Selfies Smoothed the Way for an In-Store Fashion Revolution, 
7: Sleeping without a Bedspread: Charred Paper, Toy Cars and Pixie Dust Help Decipher the Meaning of "Quality" in China, 
8: A Glimpse Behind the Scenes: Incorporating Small Data into Your Business and Life, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Index, 
About the Author, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

FANNING DESIRE

How Siberian Refrigerator Doors and a Saudi Arabian Mall Created a Revolutionary Website for Russian Women

Picture a map of the globe, and you'll notice that your perception of the world revolves entirely around where in the world you live. You can't help it, and neither can I. It's automatic. The map of the universe you and I draw, with us inside it, creates an unconscious navigational system, a behavioral GPS, that we follow every day. Our internal map dictates whether we sleep on the right or the left side of the bed at night. It determines where we position ourselves when we walk down the street with a friend or partner. Do we walk to their right, or on their left, nearer to the curb or to the buildings? On a larger cultural level, where we live also determines our timeliness. For example, in Australia, you can be assured that your guests will show up thirty minutes late, often with friends in tow that they haven't told you about. In Switzerland, guests are always on time, and if they plan on being five minutes late, they will let you know. Japanese guests will show up a half hour before they are supposed to, and in Israel, they will be forty-five minutes late.

Our internal maps even determine how we season our food.

Across many parts of the Western world, salt and pepper shakers take up a prominent space on kitchen and dining room tables. As everyone knows, most are uniform in appearance: three pinprick holes on the saltshaker, and a single one atop the pepper. If you live in Asia, however, the number of holes is reversed, with three on the pepper shaker and one on the saltshaker, thanks to the popularity of pepper in Asian countries and the cultural preference for soy sauce.

This observation, and others I've put down into a journal over the years, have made me acutely aware of the placement of objects inside and outside homes. Gardens talk. Footpaths talk. Balconies talk. Mailboxes talk. Needless to say, walls talk. My mission is to decipher what the paved stones and the peonies and the artwork and the stone figurines are telling me about their owners. Why is that painting or poster hung here and not there? What about the owl figurine, the collection of medals, or dolls, or stuffed donkeys, or the wall dedicated to ancestral photos?

We leave these clues to our identities out in plain sight, but they're universal, and in a digital era, they're also indelible. One phenomenon I've noticed brings together the two.

A decade or so ago, when smartphones and tablets achieved mass penetration, it became obvious that men and women over the age of 40 found it challenging to use touch screens. They were used to bearing down on typewriter keys, depressing On and Off buttons, pulling levers and turning knobs. They came of age in a time that required a heavier touch, sometimes a fierce grip. Today, of course, touch is more often than not glancing and ghostly. In airports across the world, one or two generations of men and women stand around helplessly before the touch screen kiosks, not altogether sure of how they work or which key to press. Meanwhile, the five-year-old child beside them navigates the screen with a virtuoso's ease. By studying the number of fingerprinted smudge marks on a phone or tablet screen, it's easy to determine the approximate age of its owner.

The shift from knobs and keys to an increasingly touch-screen world has had several effects. First, thanks to computers and touchscreen note-taking apps we're losing the ability to write things out in longhand. Second, as a result of supporting the base of their smartphones with their pinky fingers, more and more teenagers have an indentation there. Third, as a species I've observed that our hands are getting weaker. Shake hands with any high school or college student, and you'll notice how weak their grips are. Among men, the messages once subtly encoded in a handshake — strength, dryness, moisture, hand size itself — may no longer be relevant.

The collective loss of hand strength has caught the notice of the fast-moving consumer goods industry, the industry term for low-priced drinks and produce designed to sell quickly, including soft drinks, processed foods and over-the-counter medicines. It's the main reason why bottle manufacturers are loosening the grips of bottle caps, why today's car door handles are easier to open and why our kitchen drawers slide out more easily.

Our digital habits are even affecting how we eat. As a boy growing up in Denmark, on hot days my friends and I ate our ice cream cones in a predictable way. We first licked the ice cream in a circular motion, as if to seal it in the cone. We continued eating our ice cream this way, and once the ice cream was gone, we finished what was left, eating from the bottom up or the top down.

If our culture today can be partly defined by the need for immediate access, it's no surprise that the desire for instant gratification has also migrated to our ice cream cones. As I travel around the world, I've made it a point to watch how children raised in a digital environment eat their ice cream cones. There is less waiting around; the concept of "anticipation" no longer exists. Instead of licking around the sides, most of them bite the ice cream off from the top. Accustomed to websites loading fast, texts and e-mails sent off and delivered in seconds, they want their ice cream now.

How will the absence of anticipation affect today's and tomorrow's younger generation? It is easy to romanticize the concept of waiting for weeks and sometimes months for something to appear in a store, or in the mail, as people did in the 1970s and '80s. Today we have it at once — and then what? With foreshortened anticipation comes less gratification, and I can't help but wonder whether today's ice cream cones pack as much satisfaction as the ones kids ate three or four decades ago. I call today's young teens and adolescents the Power Plug Generation, or Screenagers, as they're constantly searching for the nearest wall socket. The fear of being without power is like the fear of being consigned to a barren island, marooned from friends, forced, perhaps, to face who you are without a phone in your hand.

It's also worth noting that smartphones are also responsible for the increase in the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: St Martins Pr
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1250080681
• ISBN 13: 9781250080684
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 245
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar