For full effect.. this post should be read whilst listening to Morrisey singing ‘The more you ignore me, the closer I get’

The More You Ignore Me…

The recent case from Brasil of the Brastemp customer who created his own one man social media campaign against the company for their poor level of service and the length of time he was left waiting for the company to resolve a problem with a product is just one of many examples from across the globe of where irate consumers are turning to social media to take their complaints.

Enough has been written about the Brastemp example and the phenomena by which mobs turn social media into their primary route for exacting revenge on unsympathetic companies. Little has been written however abut just why we are hardwried as consumers to sense such strong resntment when we feel ignored. However, a new piece of research from the USA may just help to explain why consumers turn to such extreme measures.

Given that recent research from Deloitte here in Brasil shows that one of the great problems faced by brands is not only making consumers feel wanted online it may also serve as a warning to brands about the potential implications of what happens when consumers feel that no-one is listening to them.

Professor Kip Williams has conducted a range of experiments at the psychology lab at Purdue University, focused on measuring aggressive behaviour which ostracism can stir up in someone given the silent treatment. Speaking on the BBC Radio programme, ‘All in the Mind’ he discusses why as social creatures our brains are wired to sense rejection and being ignored. The experiments also shows that even when people feel rejected or ignored by computer generated communications (in tests which involve game playing), they still demonstrate high levels of resentment. It can trigger very deep, low-level and primitive response –  we don’t thnk too much – we just care and we react. Interestingly our first reaction may be to raise our antenna and seek to please the individual or organisation which is ignoring us – however with continued exclusion or rejection this tends to quickly lead to a loss of self esteem, and a lack of control.

This is explained by the fact that as social beings we have evolved through feeling part of social communications networks and connected to other people – and thus when these connections break down – naturally enough – we respond.

There are other social animals who may even die when they are ignored. For humans this response is less extreme but this sense of lack of control can become aggressive. In one of the experiments, people who have been ostracized or ignored are allowed to add hot chilli sauce to food of the person who has excluded them. The victims on average add 5 times more hot sauce than in normal situations.

All of this should be taken on-board by companies as they increasingly seek to be part of on-going communications and engagement building with consumers in social media. It’s all fine and good to try and start relationship building with people, but what happens if you can’t maintain that relationship and people feel excluded or ignored. Sure for most they will just ignore you back, but not all. Recent research from Deloitte here in Brasil highlighted this dilemna. The survey conducted with over 300 companies shows that social media is being far more as a media of publication than for maintaining ongoing communications with consumers.  Success in social media is at present more likely to be evaluated in terms of number of users and recommendations as opposed to considering the level of satisfaction with ongoing communications. Discussions with students at my FAAP course have also highlighted the fact that one of the greatest complaints we have as consumers is when companies establish channels of communication but fail to respond. This is also born out by a study of participants at Campus Party in 2011 where one of the most constitent criticisms of Brazilian brands in social media is the slow or non-existent response to customer complaints.

The moral of the story… listen to more Morrisey if you really want to understand how to manage your customer relations. And if you want to start a conversation with your consumers… try not to ignore them.

What are those products and shopping moments that you just don’t want to share with anyone else – inside or outside of social media????

I keep reading so many articles about Recommender Culture and the role Social Influencer Media is having on consumer behaviour I had to retaliate – lest ye forget – dead fish can only swim with the tide.
It is one of those beautiful sunny Friday mornings in Sao Paulo and i have 2 documents to complete by the end of the day. However if i finish them today the client will have to read them over the weekend. My conscience will not allow me to rob a client of their weekend so i would prefer to sacrifice my own and chose to head off for a Friday morning ZANZAR around the centre of Sao Paulo. The part where there are 24 hour cinemas and real people – not Itaim or Brooklyn, you get the picture. (Just as an aside, and i know i shouldn’t think this – but isnt it refreshing to go past a cinema which isnt showing Pixar kids cartoons or some god awful Hollywood film by McG). Anyway i will not reveal the exact location of where i ended up doing my shopping – and that is the whole point of the post. We have become so accustomed to thinking and reading about how social media means we can and must share our shopping experiences that we forget that some times we just dont want to share with people exactly what it is that we have been purchasing.
Now in my case this morning – no i didn’t go into one of the sex shops and no i didnt buy drugs – though i was close to Cracolandia (by the way does anyone else have a vision of the Prefeitura building a Cracoloandia theme park in 10 years once Santa Cecilia is totally gentrified?).
No i was indulging my number one vice – buying vinyl.
I found the most amazing SEBO with many records for less than R$10 and all in good condition. I was shocked to pick up a copy of The Fall – Bend Sinister and Coldcut, Laurie Andersen and Steve Harley’s Cockney Rebel, David Byrne’s Uh-Oh and The Colourfield (Terry Hall ex-Specials) amongst others.
You have no idea of the joy but also of the complete lack of desire to share with anybody the precise location of the Sebo. No F*in Way.
All of which got me thinking about the anti-social influencer consumer model – and i was wondering what other examples we might be able to share???
In all honesty this practice of cratediggers not wishing to share their treasures has a long history. I think that even pre late 1970s Hip-Hop DJs were sticking white labels over their records so that other DJs could not find out the names of the records and go out and buy them. I know that as a man the thrill of discovery and the desire of sharing our wisdom has strong power over our consumer behaviour – but not always.
So please … feel free to share – what are those guilty pleasures, competitive shopping dynamics that turn you into an unrecommender?????????

I dont know about you but it seems like a long long time ago that the World Cup finished. Just about enough time for us to start to feel nostalgic and forgive Dunga, Rooney and Ronaldo for ruining the months of June and July… OK maybe not. It is however an apt time to announce the launch of the Copa 140 book. Well not quite yet but sometime very soon. During the tournament we were tracking, interacting and laughing at we believe over 500,000 – yes half a million Tweets from Brasileiros during the tournament. It gave us a rare glimpse at the life of Brasilians during this special month. If you go here and check out the favourites, by scrolling down you can see all of the Tweets which we favourited over the course of the month – this is of the course the best 2,000 for the original thousand and thousands which we were following. It reads like something of a reverse digital documentary of the nation and its experiences during the World Cup. The book has allowed us to categorise and add some thoughts on how Brasil was Tweeting its Copa…Unique??? We think so.. if you know of any other similar examples we’d love to hear about them. if you are interested in knowing more please get in touch.

“When Alan Roberto Lima was growing up in Vila Aliança, a notoriously violent favela on the western outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, only the community’s elite could afford mobile phones.

“The bandits and the big businessmen,” said Lima, 33, whose family has lived in the community since 1962, when the government evicted thousands of slum dwellers, including his mother, from the city centre and packed them off to housing estates such as Vila Aliança. Today things have changed. Just as the heavily armed drug traffickers have seized control of the slums since the 1980s, so too have mobiles.

“Cell phones are just like cellulite – any old bum has it,” said Lima, who pays R$140 (£40) a month for his Nextel radio phone with 400 free minutes and which helps him run his beachwear business, which produces over 1,000 pairs of Bermuda shorts each month for the chic boutiques of Ipanema and Copacabana.

Brazil is at the forefront of the mobile phone revolution. According to figures released last month by Brazil’s telecommunications regulator, Anatel, 1.3 million new mobile phone users were registered in January 2009 alone, taking the total number of users in Brazil to 151.9 million out of a total population of 190 million. On the frontline of the mobile phone’s charge in South America are the red brick shanty towns of cities such as Rio and São Paulo. Mobile phone companies are increasingly targeting the slums in search of new customers.

“Without my mobile, my business would become unviable,” said Lima, whose family business helps dress Rio’s fashionable beachgoers.”

International Women’s Day yesterday saw the annual collection of articles across the Americas about the role of women in society. In Brazil, Folha de Sao Paulo reported the findings of a number of different studies which emphasise the implications  the changing position of women in society, the workplace and within families and the household.  Increasingly women are becoming the dominant breadwinner within homes. Cases where the income of women exceeds that of men in the home are still in the minority, but in the last 25 years, they more than doubled, as shown by figures released by IPEA (Institute of Applied Economic Research)

From 1982 to 2007, the proportion of households where the income of women exceeded that of their partner grew from 3% to 11%. When one adds to this homes where the woman lives without a spouse, the percentage of houses where they were the main or only providers more than doubled, going from 13% to 30% in the last 25 years.

Another fact that demonstrates the advances made by women is the finding that women’s contribution to the total income of households in Brazil has already reached 40%. In 1982, this proportion was 23%. The changes have been explained mainly because of improved female education and the reduction in fertility rates. Today, the IBGE has shown that education of women between 20 and 59 years exceeds that of
men. In 1982, the situation was the reverse.

If women’s participation in the labor market has changed considerably in recent years, the same can not be said of the division of household chores. Even in households where both work, most of the responsibilities in the home are still left to women. In 2007, 90% of women were busy taking care of household chores. Among men, the percentage was only 50%. They also spent on average more than twice the number of
weekly hours to these activities than their partners: 22.2 hours, compared with 9.6 for men. The unequal division of domestic tasks is really common even in cases where women have higher income than the man.

Meanwhile in Lima, the headlines in El Comercio related to a survey conducted in Peru found that 78% of women believe that they have the same opportunities as men. The report from the International Labor Organization (ILO), states that women show almost the same level of labor force participation as men (except in construction, transportation, manufacturing and domestic service) and almost the same unemployment rates.
In terms of payment, 53% of women answered that there is no wage gap between women and men. However, this is more a wish than a reality, as according to surveys, the gap between the incomes of men and women for the execution of the same work stands at 30 %.
At another level, an overwhelming 97% of Peruvian women stated a desire to work. Of this, half prefer to work part time (predominant sector being married women in social class E), while 49% want to work like men (single women predominantly in the classes A and B). Furthermore, 91% believed that women should be independent entrepreneurs.

The report is somewhat akin to a soft ‘moral panic’ stating that young people who are kings of the digital age are costly to keep, pragmatic, lacking idealism and generally lost or confused in a world of endless choice, much of which is bought on by their being endlessly online. The internet and social media is in part blamed for young people’s lack of reflexivity and a ‘look at me’ culture, meanwhile the growth of social contacts via Orkut has fuelled increased party attendance and this is blmed for increased drinking and drug taking amongst Brazilians.The article however also seeks to criticise teens for having lost the sense of revolution that their parents exhibited, worrying only about getting into stable employment and receiving a good salary.
The shift in power relations due to adoption of technologies is also seen as a factor behind how young people now increasingly control household spending behaviour and the fact that young people are now 5 times more expensive than 30 years ago.
The article which starts by drawing comparison to Holden Caulfield’s crisis of 2 generations ago ends with a list of recommendations to parents on how to raise their children with reference to such issues as – how to get them to answer the phone, or stop exposing too much of their lives online!

If you would like to know more about our own extensive and less sensationalist research report into Young Lives across South America – please click here