My digital footprint

Dan's story...

Some people would call me obsessive, but it isn't true. I think everyone has there own quirks of habit, and in any case, there isn't much of a jump from being a creature of habit to one of comfort.

Think about what you do when you first get home. Whether it's auto-reflex of leaving your keys in the bowl by the door or the way you can disable the alarm while kicking off your work shoes. You have a routine, almost a ritual, that is pre-cognisant and simply says, 'welcome home'.

And I'm the same. Except I'm not. Because everyone's home is different, and so by extension everyone's routine is equally unique. For me it's a sense of creating my own personal audio-visual environment, without which I just wouldn't feel at home at all.

Put another way, what I seek is to create a sort of digital footprint that makes my home my own, with its own individual technological scent. So as soon as I get in, the angled spotlights come on, not too bright or glaring. Next it's music, an internet radio stream for downstairs, music for my bedroom and the coffee maker gurgling in the kitchen.

And so it continues. For some, a roaring fire in the hearth is what makes a sitting room enticing, but prosaic as it might sound, I find as much solace is to be found from the familiar rumblings of the tumble dryer, or background hum of the plasma, its volume set low on the News 24 channel.

Implication for Comet: Our mums may have spent the 80s struggling to programme the VHS, but three decades on and Comet allows people to infuse their technological scent and establish their own ritualistic digital footprint in their home

The Heart of the Home

Erin's story...

More than 70 years may have gone by since Sweets Ramirez was wooed by the gift a vacuum cleaner in John Steinbeck's “Tortilla Flat". Despite the fact that neither she, nor anyone else in the village had electricity. Day after day she parades her new acquisition in from of her net-curtained windows, its plug dangling disconsolate behind her.

It would be easy to dismiss Sweets's relationship with her prized accessory as a shallow attempt at social one-upmanship. And there is no doubt that Steinbeck meant us to view his vain and superficial protagonist in this light. But there is a deeper truth behind Sweets' infatuation with her non-functional cleaner. For her it becomes an emblem, a totemic signifier of a woman's emotive engagement with her home.

And am I very different from Sweets? I, too, anthropomorphise the technological devices that populate my house. I smile, only half ironically, at the reassuring “hello” message that lights up each time I turn on my stereo, and find myself reddening (less, perhaps, than I should) as I catch myself giving technology pet names (In my case Tom Tom gained the name Betsy). I also invite friends and family to sit around 'my digital campfire,' otherwise known as the Panasonic Viera.

Magritte underlined the disparity between the arbitrary words we use and the real objects they referred to when he penned his axiomatic “Ceci n'est pas une Pipe”, but Sweets would likewise say, this is no vacuum cleaner, this is MY vacuum cleaner.

If in the 50s people defined their houses by the cars parked in the drive, witness a shift in the way we establish a personal rapport with the places where we live; less by the Beamer or the Audi, and more by the Sony, Wii, Smeg or PVR.

Implication for Comet: Our relationship with the technology that fills our homes is less one of functionality, and more the symbiosis of a loved and trusted family retainer whose presence ensures the household harmony. The days of domestic help may be behind us, but the gadgets of the home are more than accessories. They aren't just clever or sophisticated add-ons to a home, they are something to build a home around. Your home.

Daunted by Technology

I walk into Comet and I feel daunted. Daunted by the vast array of stuff that's on offer. Daunted by the lines and lines of glaring TV screens and the cacophony of competing sounds and lights. Daunted by the 30 different bread makers to choose from. Daunted by the prospect of having to ask a spotty teenager what RAM, gigabytes and the WMAs are. I've already got a headache and I've yet to walk in past the security gate. I almost expect one of the fraternity of geeks to ask me “Papers Please” - do I belong in here?

Compare this with my harmonious and pleasurable experience at the Apple store and the difference is clear. From Apple's sleek lines to the minimalist stylings of mobile phones, digital cameras and MP3 players, unobtrusiveness has become the key. Less is definitely more.

The future promises an absence of the familiar jumble of wires as hidden wifi-enabled servers render home entertainment cable-free, and flat-screen plasmas retreat discretely back towards the wall renouncing their former bulky prominence in the middle of the living room.

The clutter of technology has disappeared, just as shelves groaning under the weight of VHS tapes have been replaced by the virtuality of files stored on hidden home-servers. We prefer to feel we are in control, not just in our choice of gadgets, but in the way that technology contributes to our home environment. We do not want to feel the slaves of technology's autocratic will. Rather, we want to feel that it responds to our selective choices.

This needs to be reflected in our shopping experiences. Despite its growing importance in our lives, technology should no longer daunt the consumer. The bombastic audio-visual overloads of yesteryear need to give way to a stylistic minimalism. Technology can be calming, reassuring and empowering, and this should be reflected in the places where it is sold.

Implications for Comet: No more glaring screens and booming stereos, but sleek edged and soft, responsive lighting that entices you in. And, most importantly, a clearing of the decks to minimise clutter. Technology may be everywhere, but its presence should never be more than intuited. A pleasant aroma or familiar tune playing in the background.

Break Free

"The housewife of the future will be neither a slave to servants nor herself a drudge. She will give less attention to the home, because the home will need less; she will be rather a domestic engineer than a domestic labourer"

Source: Good House Keeping, October 1912.

EVERYDAY ECONOMICS

Microwave Oven Liberation

Household appliances, not Gloria Steinem, ushered women into the workplace.

By Steven E. Landsburg
Posted Thursday, Jan. 4, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET

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Millenniums and centuries come and go, but some things remain distressingly unchanged. Nearly a thousand years ago, William the Conqueror evicted "every inhabitant from huge stretches of the countryside to provide new forests" (I quote historian David Howarth). It was the millennium's first act of environmental extremism, but by no means the last. And just over a hundred years ago,Scientific American reported that economic progress in Manhattan was near an end because the island could support only a limited number of horses. That narrowness of vision, fueled by a fundamental misunderstanding of how economies grow, continues to plague our national discourse.

In the long run, economic growth comes not from cramming more horses onto your island, or more factories into your rust belt, or even more information onto your servers, but from technological breakthroughs—not from more of the same but from the new and previously unthinkable.

By the middle of the last century, Scientific American's false vision of the future had been displaced by a new vision, expressed in the March 1949 issue of Popular Mechanics: "Where a calculator on the Eniac is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1-1/2 tons."

Wrong again, but then so was everybody. We never got any of the stuff we were promised by The Jetsons (and I have waited my whole life for the personal rocket pack), but the stuff we did get—Prozac, microwave ovens, and the Internet—turned out to be equally fabulous.

Along with new technology, the century brought new social norms. In 1900, fewer than 5 percent of women worked outside the home. The rest spent an average of 58 hours a week on housework. By 1975, that was down to 18 hours, and it's probably lower today. As housework got easier, women's social and economic status grew. That's no coincidence, according to three economists who I will refer to collectively as GSY: Jeremy Greenwood at the University of Rochester, Ananth Seshadri at the University of Wisconsin, and Mehmet Yorukoglu at the University of Chicago. GSY contend that women's liberation is a direct consequence of the "housework revolution" that brought about the advent of central heating, dryers, electric irons, frozen foods, refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and running water.

Here's GSY's account of a typical housewife's laundry day in 1900: First, our heroine ports water to the stove and heats it by burning wood or coal. Then she cleans the clothes by hand, rinses them, wrings them out (either by hand or with a mechanical wringer), then hangs them to dry and moves on to the oppressive task of ironing, using heavy flatirons that are heated continuously on the stove. By 1945, things had changed: About 60 percent of households had washing machines (though essentially none had dryers). How dramatically did that change affect women's lives? In 1945, government researchers undertook to find out. The researchers observed a farm wife named Mrs. Verett while she did a 38-pound load of laundry. Without electric appliances, Mrs. Verett spent 4 hours washing and 4 1/2 hours ironing, and she walked 6,303 feet along the way. After she got a washing machine and an electric iron, she spent 41 minutes washing and 1 3/4 hours ironing, walking only 665 feet along the way.

It wasn't just laundry: At the beginning of the century, most households had no running water, and none had central heating. So, routine housework included lugging 7 tons of coal and 9,000 gallons of water around the house every year.

It's been argued that women's liberation—and more specifically the entry of women into the labor force—was driven by charismatic leaders from Elizabeth Cady Stanton through Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, or by the social upheavals associated with World War II. But the GSY team argues that women's labor force participation is a natural consequence of appliances that freed them from the drudgery of housework. Over the course of the century, those appliances have gotten cheaper; as they've gotten cheaper, they've spread to more households. As they've spread to more households, more women have entered the marketplace.

International comparisons tell the same story: By and large, the countries where durable goods are cheapest are the countries where more women work for wages. The same was true across the United States in the middle years of the century.

I'd like to see GSY apply their methods to study the men's liberation that happened earlier in the millennium, when large numbers of men left farms to go to work in the marketplace. Was that revolution also driven by technological innovations? My guess is yes, but as far as I know, nobody's done the kind of careful data analysis for men that GSY have done for women.

My prediction for this century is that technological innovation will continue to transform and enrich our lives in ways that none of us can now imagine. Of all the predictions one could have made a century ago, that was the only one that proved true.

Steven E. Landsburg is the author, most recently, of More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics. You can e-mail him atarmchair@troi.cc.rochester.edu.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/95955/

Fear

When people go into a Comet store they "feel on their guard"; when they go into a JLP they feel "relaxed".

The role for advertising may be in "putting people at their ease". Comet is a refuge, a safe haven from the complexities of choice.

WHAT KIND OF ONLINE SHOPPER ARE YOU?

The Internet has forever changed the way we shop.  It has increased the speed and ease of buying products and provided the consumer with a global library of information, real variety and choice.  Being able to shop online is no longer the challenge as demonstrated this week, when UK online shoppers broke all previous records by reportedly spending £767,500 in just 60 seconds at 1.09pm in December.  Meeting the needs of all online shopper-types, is.

According to Comet, the UK’s leading electrical retailer, to succeed as an etailer during peak shopping periods, the challenge is being able to cater for the demands of all shopper types.  This means delivering products and services to the people who need them in the way they want them, when they want them.

The verdict of a recent survey Comet conducted involving 2243 of its online customers, is that different types of web shoppers have different goals and shopping strategies, with mens’ and womens’ styles varying. 

Forty-five per cent use the Internet for checking out product information “Grazer-style” and doing research before rushing in. The “Sniffers” (the bargain-hunting shoppers), representing just over 15 per cent of the total polled, use comparison shopping tools and are just looking for the lowest price. Grazers and Sniffers are both more likely to be male than female (Grazers representing 61 per cent male to 39 per cent female and Sniffers 59 per cent male to 41 per cent female)

Overall, the survey indicates that while the Internet is often the first port of call for these shoppers seeking information before they buy, it indicates that nearly 16 per cent are“Combos”; the shopping elite who use the Internet mainly as a source of information.  This group like taking the best of the new with the reassurance of the traditional and do enjoy the offline shopping experience too.  Of this 16 per cent a “Combo” is more likely to be female than male – (53 per cent to 47 per cent respectively).  Indeed, of those customers polled given the choice of all Comet.co.uk’s services nearly 44 per cent liked the “Combo”Click & Collect service best.  This service enables online shoppers to order online and collect from a store 30 minutes’ later.  Of those polled, women were more likely than men to favour “real” people, engineers to install and repair products, and guaranteed deliveries.

Of those polled just over 10 per cent admit to having an “SAS-approach” to online shopping, making precision strikes targeting only the areas and website they need, and then quickly logging off.  They know exactly what they want before logging on and only purchase that item.   SAS precision strikers are more likely to be male than female (68 per cent to 32 per cent respectively).

However, the remainder use the Internet on a “Needs Must” basis (4.5 per cent).  Those shopping out of necessity, or if they are pressed for time, are more likely to be female (55 per cent) than male (45 per cent).  The social “Tiddleywinkers” (nearly 2 per cent of the total polled) are enthusiastic, adventurous web users who will ping to new ideas as they are presented to them and use the Internet as a form of recreation (67 per cent female, 33 per cent male).

Commenting, Simon Rigby, Head of Direct Channels at Comet, says:

“Our challenge is to meet the needs of the greatest number of shoppers.  By undertaking research on a regular basis, we learn more about our customers’ shopping needs and styles.  This helps us to deliver all the necessary reassurances, product ranges and services.

“We conducted this survey during our peak selling period as we are in the process of developing our range of online interactive services, such as Live Chat and CometTV.co.uk. Powerful multi media sales tools will soon become standard in the online shopping arena. In three years, you'll be just as likely to click and watch a product related video of your intended purchase on your computer before you buy - as you are to have an email address today.”

Source: http://press.comet.co.uk/newsdetails.aspx?m=2&mi=62&ref=185