Why today’s young have such weak handshakes
SMALL DATA
by Martin Lindstrom (John Murray £10.99)
BIG data we know about. Three billion people are now online, 300 hours of videos are uploaded on to YouTube every minute. And all this stuff we are doing online is being monitored by companies who want our money. Big data has become big business.
But how useful is it? Martin Lindstrom is a Danish brand consultant. He says working out what millions of people are doing is all very well — but does it tell you what one person might do, or you, or me? No it doesn’t.
So Lindstrom travels the world observing people and drawing often bizarre and counter-intuitive conclusions from their habits.
His great example is Lego, which reached something of an impasse in the early Noughties. Sales were dropping, and the company wanted to know why. All the big data suggested that young people were obsessed with the internet.
But some small data researchers visited an 11-year-old Lego fan in Germany, and asked him what his proudest possession was. The boy pointed to a pair of old Adidas trainers, which were worn down in such a precise way that they showed the boy was a champion skateboarder. From this single incident, the researchers concluded that children ‘attain social currency among their peers by playing and achieving a high level of mastery at their chosen skill, whatever that is.
‘If the skill is valuable and worthwhile, they will stick with it until they get it right, never mind how long it takes.’
Lego changed its entire strategy based on this chance observation. It made larger and more complicated models and Lego became about mastery and craftsmanship. Ten years later, it overtook Mattel as the world’s largest toymaker.
The stuff this guy finds out! For instance, there’s a move towards touch-screens on phones and computers. Older people find this difficult: they’re used to pressing buttons, pulling levers and turning knobs. However, a five-year-old navigates the screen with a virtuoso’s ease. One unforeseen result of this is that younger people’s hands are getting weaker. Shake hands with a youth and you’ll notice how feeble their grip is.
As a consequence, bottle manufacturers are loosening the grips of caps, and car doors are much easier to open.
On a trip to Russia, it was discovered that very few Russian homes had mirrors, but most had lots of fridge magnets, many depicting foreign climes, which signified their owners’ dreams of escape, of a better life, for their children if not for them.
Lindstrom knows, from old research, that 40 per cent of the world’s toothbrushes have red handles, while in Saudi Arabia only 2 per cent are this colour. What does it mean?
It is a fascinating and revealing book, with unexpected treasures in every chapter.
And the Saudis? They turn out to have a striking and almost universal fear of fire — hence no red toothbrushes. Who would ever have imagined that?