Shopping is the New Hunting-Gathering

The latest programme from BBC Radio 4's In Business has a fascinating feature on the UK's retail scene and some of the large developments underway. A key insight is that shopping is evolutionary: we behave as our hunter-gatherer ancestors did when foraging for food. And yes: the men hunt (making quick in/out shopping trips) and women gather (browsing and choosing).

And this thought struck us: Liverpool's massive new 42 acre brown-field city centre development called Liverpool One could soon become the new Dundrum - for Dubliners ...

Learning Insight from Colombo

That's right - release your inner sleuth ...

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A Big Future for Nostalgia

"Now listen up children, there was a time - long, long ago - when you didn't just press a button to call someone on the phone, you had to turn a dial in a circle. Please stop sniggering at the back, it's true. Of course, we'll never see the like again ..."

From iDial. This could be catching.

Has your brand been tagged?

This is a great example of web 2.0 applied to branding - it's called Brand Tags.

You type in the three words you most associate with a brand and then the site creates a 'cloud' of words from all the entries, with the more popular words appearing as bigger than the less popular ones.

Choose your brand here. A selection from the Brand Tag for Guinness is shown below:

We've been Googled

Yet another great innovation from Google - this time it's Google Maps, and we're on it!


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One in three don't know their own mobile number

It seems we're turning cybernetic. Our daily immersion in technologies such as search engines and mobile phones means that we no longer need to 'remember' things. Like phone numbers. That's the finding of a fascinating US survey, which found that a third of mobile users under 30 years of age didn't know their own mobile number - they just 'tooth' contact details to friends and so don't need to know it.

Ask yourself: what's your spouse's or partner's mobile phone number? Of the contacts on your mobile how many of the numbers can you recall accurately? Amárach's research points to an emerging generation of 'cybernetic' consumers who are totally dependent on technology to do things that their parents' generation used old fashioned brain power to do. Don't believe us? Consider this: 91% of mobile phone users keep their mobiles within one meter 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

We're turning cybernetic.

Lighting at the end of the tunnel

Habitat's decision to pull out off Ireland became clearer in light of today's retail sales data from the CSO. The value and volume of sales in furniture and lighting stores were both down 13% in March compared with the same period last year.

The headline figures are not good: total retail sales volumes in March were down 2.1% year-on-year. Take out cars (not quite a weekly shopping experience) and total sales volumes were up an anaemic 1.2% - or 5.2% if you add inflation.

Retail spending accounts for nearly half of all consumer spending, so clearly consumers are in a purse and wallet tightening mood. Our own survey research confirms this - consumers are shifting their spending preferences to a value focus; and the usual switching inertia is beginning to crumble in both the retail and services sectors.

And that's just the figures for the end of Q1 ...

Work 2.0

If it's good enough for IBM ...

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Welcome to Eirvana

UCD's Cormac Ó Gráda has done us a big favour by reminding us how much better off we are in Ireland today. A healthy antidote to the accumulating doom and gloom in the news headlines.

HT to the Geary Behaviour Centre (again ;-)

If MySpace were a country it would be the 8th largest country in the world

We thought that was a 'wow-stat' ... Bottom line: in such a world marketers should forget experiences and focus on 'micro-interactions'. Read on:

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