I had the opportunity to see Jan Chipchase (@janchip) speak at the @PSFK Good Ideas Salon this past thursday evening. Hosted by JWT at their New York office in Midtown. Jan is a principal researcher for Nokia, and basically his job is to travel the world and study behavioral patterns of global populations for identification of consumer gaps.
The presentation in which Jan spoke to is that included above. You won’t find much text in the slides, however, the images tell quite a profound story. My takeaway from the talk, as a brand strategist, was a more keen appreciation for ethnographic research methodology and data collection. Jan takes an incredibly deep dive into cultural trends by entrenching himself into the lifestyles and behaviors of people, who normally would be ignored by mainstream business. Nokia has taken an interest in predicting how their products will fit into growing consumer segments. In that respect, the fastest growth will be among populations in urbanized areas, especially among the impoverished.
It makes sense that Nokia has the vision to find value in this particular consumer segment. Most industries and companies believe in the top-down model for product penetration. Thus, they typically market to consumers of the mid and upper ranges in the socio-economic ladder. However, it becomes a different story when mobile access is more prevalent than electricity access, and even water access in some areas of the world.
In developed nations the web is seen as the most important of the digital channels for consumer communication. However, mobile represents a significantly more important and viable platform in nations or urbanized sectors where populations don’t have the means to access the Internet or electricity to even power a computer. Just as the web is changing the way we socialize, mobile is changing the manner in which billions of people globally connect and communicate. There’s even a theory, growing in acceptance, that mobile can replace the old method of identifying households – by moving from home address based to mobile address based.
Anyway, have a look and enjoy.
