Henley Centre HeadlightVision

Michelle Singer writes:

People in the UK feel far more comfortable about sharing their personal data with government if they are also allowed to share in the benefits. This was the conclusion drawn from new survey research presented at last week’s IIPS briefing: ‘How concerned are citizens about data and privacy in the public services?’ (The Institute for Insight in the Public Services is a joint initiative between Henley Centre HeadlightVision and its sister company, BMRB Social Research, which provides a thought-leading insight forum for those working across government.)

The chart at the top of this post shows that, firstly, citizens’ first reaction is one of extreme wariness – no doubt exacerbated by recent media stories about data that has gone ‘missing in action’. However, when requests for personal information are sweetened by the promise of “better service”, the picture changes dramatically. Over two thirds of citizens are then happy to provide their details to government departments.

Amongst those who remain sceptical, a significant barrier is that they do not understand why government would want to gather their data, let alone to share it with other government departments. The policy concept of ‘joined up government’ has evidently not yet been sufficiently well explained to its public stakeholders.

While these findings have direct relevance for the government’s public service transformation agenda, they also reinforce a broader insight about shifting power relationships: consumers nowadays are far more likely to recognise the value that companies and organisations derive from their personal data and information (as well as the risks entailed in handing over control); as a result, they are demanding both justification and recompense, as well as reassurance that their information will be stored securely.

Andrew Curry writes:

The new media analyst Clay Shirky caused a bit of a stir in blogland last week with a compelling talk in which he described leisure time as a ’social surplus’ which had been pretty much wasted over the past fifty years through watching TV. Actually, the argument was a bit more complex than that - his idea was that people had watched TV while we got used to the idea of having more leisure time, and now that we’d got used to it, we were starting to use bits of this time more productively, for example by building socially useful online applications.

There’s some interesting data in the talk. American TV watching (as a whole) takes up about two billion hours of time each year. And he calculates, with a little help, that building the whole of Wikipedia so far has taken about 100 million hours. American TV, in other words, takes up 2,000 Wikipedia projects per year.

Now the notion of time as a currency is one we talk about quite a lot round here. And it’s clear that there are different sorts of time. There’s work time (paid or unpaid); maintenance or ‘chore’ time (what you have to do to maintain your role); there’s recovery time (which is mostly where the TV watching comes in). And then there are the types which take you out of the work-eat-sleep cycle; ‘discovery’ time, or personal exploration time, and ‘identity’ time, which tend to be the places where personal roots are found.

I’m not sure about some of the social history in Clay’s talk, if only because, pre-television, there were rich social activities despite our having less leisure time (the huge 1930s ramblers’ campaign for the right of access to the countryside, for example), but I am persuaded by the underlying idea. It doesn’t take much of a switch from ‘recovery time’ to ‘discovery’ time to change the balance of social energy. This might not be online; book clubs, I think, would also fit the prospectus. But as he says:

It’s better to do something than to do nothing.

Futurismic has a video of Clay making his argument.

Photograph © Peter Curry 2008

Trevor Harvey writes:

We have a longstanding segmentation which helps us, and our clients, to understand consumer attitudes to financial services, so we have used it to explore attitudes to the credit crunch. The segmentation tests for levels of involvement in financial provision, along with levels of risk one is willing to accept. (The current segment sizes are above, along with the original percentages when we first built it ten years ago.) ‘Pressured providers’, the largest segment, are engaged with their finances because they have to be.

The main finding from the analysis, which we wrote up for WARC, the World Advertising Research Center (subscription required, free trial available), after presenting it to clients, was that for two of the segment groups, the Pressured Providers and the Free Thinking Independents, debt was integral to their lifestyle. As I say in the WARC article,

attitudes towards debt, which have been built up through easy access and optimism, are not likely to dissipate… appetite for borrowing is unlikely to diminish in the two groups noted for driving the debt market. Pressured Providers will continue to need help because they have no other means of survival, and Free-Thinking Independents will continue to take as much as they’re given to help fund a lifestyle born of attitude rather than means.

Market conditions provide some constraints on the ability of financial services companies to provide loans. But there are also reputational risks in lending to people who are borrowing under pressure and who may struggle to repay.

['Measuring cups', (c) Christine U'ren]

Becky Rowe writes:

We all live our lives on different planes and engage in diverse activities. As a consultancy we call this repertoire living - the idea that people are not defined by one interest, one value or one perspective, and instead engage in what can sometimes seem contradictory activities, often switching roles in a moment.

The starkness of the different roles I play came to the fore recently, when almost exactly 24 hours after the Millennials breakfast briefing I found myself in Oldham to interview two 19-year-old single mothers about their precarious financial situations. This is repertoire working in extremis. When we think of the Millennials in terms of marketing, we think of bright young things, Topshop shoppers, chatting away on their mobiles, playing on their Wiis - the children of affluent Britain. The reality of living at the other end of the spectrum hit me hard when I interviewed these two young women.

They shared with me how they manage their day-to-day lives on £60 a week. They dream of going to college to further their education and get jobs (one wants to be a social worker, the other a nursery teacher), but can’t afford the £3.90 bus fare it would cost them to get to college, let alone the additional money for childcare. They feel everybody hates them and judges them:

“I would stack shelves, sweep floors, make tea. I don’t want to be on benefits, but nobody will give me a chance. They turn me away before they have already seen me.”

These Millennials aren’t the target audience of big brands. They aren’t the most articulate or the most entrepreneurial. They are not ‘doted on’. I got the impression that our research interview was the first time anyone had listened to their perspective on anything for a long time, although what they said was sensible, interesting and practical.

Yesterday my work was about selling more computer games or jeans. Today it’s about the future of two desperate, young mums. I feel lucky that I get to wear so many hats in my professional role, but on this occasion, the contrast was disheartening.

The picture is by artist Christine U’ren, from her ‘Still Lives’ series. This picture, along with more of her work, can be found on her website.

Jo Phillips writes:

Our More London office reopens today after two days of closure following the Great Flood of Tooley Street. Some took the fact that the nearby Greater London Assembly building was out out of action in the week of the mayoral elections as a bad omen for Ken Livingstone. The events have demonstrated rather vividly the vulnerability of all city infrastructure; you might have thought a fifth floor office would be immune (I did), but servers and electricity supply in the basement are - unsurprisingly - vulnerable to street level flooding. Guy’s and St Thomas’s Hospital was similarly affected.

In this instance, 7 million litres of water poured out of a burst water main. But it gives us a glimpse of a possible future London — as we see more climate-change related extreme weather events, what will change? What I learnt was that crises in the real world push us further into the virtual world. With email and phone systems down, our company used text messages and a blog to disseminate important information. Local residents similarly used the SE1 community forum to communicate with each other. One possible outcome is an increase in mobile working (or more exactly, ‘extended working’, in which the workplace is extended in space and time), but this leads to interesting questions about infrastructure. Maybe not that sensible to leave it below street level when the local flood risk map looks like this:

So maybe there’s likely to be less emphasis on managing your own infrastructure, and more on getting it delivered to you as a service by a supplier - already a strong developing trend, as Nicholas Carr blogged this week. Having servers down in the basement may provide an illusion of control, but would not prove very resilient in a world of increasing environmental risk.

Emily Pitts writes:

I took this shot of the back of London Bridge station recently - something about the way the light was falling, illuminating the bus and the signage on the station, caught my eye. The woman standing by the van looks so dated! It was a surprise to find a hint of something more permanent than the hordes of tourists outside the London Dungeons each day and the dull chrome geometry of Foster…

Joe Ballantyne writes:

Back in the late 90s, and even more recently, globalisation was all the rage. Some people thought this was a jolly good thing and it would make us all rich and free, while others thought it was a really bad thing. which would lead to greater poverty and environmental damage. Either way, almost everyone agreed that we were careering towards a brave new globalised world, ruled by the free flow of capital between nations, and characterised by global institutions and global flows of people and goods.

Fast forward a decade, however, and things start to look quite a bit different. Countries like India, Russia and China are much wealthier and more powerful than ten years ago, the expansion of international groupings such as the EU seems to have all but halted, and the ongoing drama of the credit crunch suggests that financial deregulation has reached its limits. Protectionism is a recurring theme in the Democrat candidates’ contest in the US, and the chief executive of Deutsche Bank was recently quoted as saying that he “no longer believes in the market’s self-healing power” – and when the head of a major bank starts saying that financial markets need some sort of state intervention, you know something’s up. The public seem to think so: most of us admit a growing suspicion around the role free markets in the economy.

So how did the global theorists – from both the left and the right – so misjudge globalisation? There’s a whole thesis to be written on this, but some pointers could be:

• Many of them were working in internationally-focussed institutions such as universities or global banks – which probably blinded them to the attitudes of the majority who weren’t globetrotting, post-national types.

• Many of them had come to believe the widely canvassed idea that financial power will always trump state power – where as in fact, nationalism is a tremendously strong driver of domestic politics and therefore of political change.

• The Brits in particular lived in a country which had probably gone further than almost any other towards developing a ‘post-national’ identity, embracing the market and minimising the role of national symbols such as the monarchy, religion and so on. But what happened in Britain wasn’t replicated elsewhere.

One of the things we say in futures work is that if the filters you see the world through are too strong, they act like the blinkers on a horse - and create blind spots which make it harder to see signs of change. It’s interesting to think of other blindspots our assumptions about the world might create for us.

The picture was taken by David Eppstein.

Jake Goretzki writes:

In the first half of this post, I wrote about flags as brands with an army and navy - but still in need of relaunching or repositioning from time to time. When they do work, relaunches are marvellously transformatory. Imagine Canada with this blazer badge of a flag (below) - unbelievably, this survived until 1965. It seems to convey the notion of Canada as some kind of British backwater. How could it ever have stood out? The Maple leaf on the other hand is ownable, differentiated and unifying. That said, of course, Quebec might beg to differ – anyone for a rebrand?

Canada Pre-1965

Canada Post-1965

Read the rest of this entry »

Holly Moore from Yankelovich writes:

The latest television programming kerfuffle over the U.S. fashion reality TV show Project Runway is telling us something interesting about both the future of the reality genre, and the increasing visibility of life coaching.

For new readers, the kerfuffle goes like this. The producers of Project Runway, now a four seasons-old hit, are trying to move the show from Bravo (the U.S. cable network owned by NBC Universal) to Lifetime Television, a cable network that’s looking to diversify beyond programming that’s often about women in crisis. NBC claims it still has the rights to future seasons, and so, inevitably, is suing the producers.

But viewers are more likely to worry about the future of the person who has become America’s favorite mentor, Tim Gunn. Unlike many reality show stars, Tim’s the compassionate master of constructive criticism and tough love. Gunn is the tutor we all hope to have and the manager all managers should strive to be. (I recall an Echo Boomer comedian once saying, “I so wish he was my gay dad.”) His popularity and fashion judgment have already earned him his own show and a big gig as the creative chief at Liz Claiborne.

We talk a great deal about the importance of coaching in the Yankelovich MONITOR. And in an era in which so many of us under 40 were raised to think that we were unconditionally special, it’s rather remarkable to find a voice who can find the balance between nurturing growth and encouraging exploration while still reinforcing objective standards of excellence.

So while the courts decide where viewers should ultimately tune in, hopefully content creators will notice how quickly Gunn’s brand star rose - and the void he filled in the landscape of back-biting reality programming - to help make Project Runway a TV brand worth fighting for.

(Image from BravoTV.com)

Andrew Curry writes:

Regular readers of the blog will recall that we merged with the American research company Yankelovich earlier this year. We’re going through the usual processes of finding an appropriate name for the overall group, which will take a little time. Our new American colleagues already produce a short weekly newsletter, the Monitor Minute, which takes a lookat US consumer trends and insights. (The Monitor Minute sign-up page is here). In addition, however, they’re going to be contributing to this blog as well. The first post, which will be going up shortly, is by Monitor Minute editor Holly Moore.