Pi-Consulting

The last wonder-drug to change socio-sexual behaviour in Spain this much was probably aspirin, that ready answer to “Not tonight, querido, I have a headache”. Now it’s the turn of the Viagra generation. Spain’s leading sexologist, Dr. Carlos San Martin, rather poetically calls it “an explosion”. On one widely-reported occasion, a man pulled a convincing-looking water-pistol (surely a symbolic choice of weapon?) in a Madrid pharmacy, and demanded their entire stock of the performance-enhancing blue pills. He was back two hours later to present the astonished lady-pharmacists with a large bouquet of roses. Which was when they arrested him. However, his enthusiasm for Viagra marks a widespread social phenomenon. Pfizer sold a million boxes last year, the equivalent of one pack for every 17 adult male Spaniards. Individual pills have changed hands at discos and parties for $80 apiece, often paired with tabs of Extacy. Women badger their boyfriends to get prescriptions, putting a new twist between the sexes on sexual liberation. Sociologists attribute the trend to Spain shrugging off the conservatism and sexual repression of the Franco era, with the afternoon siesta now giving ground to an energetic quest for ‘nookie’. However, there seem to be limits to the miracles Viagra can sustain. A lady IT professional in her mid-40s recently dumped her psychologist boyfriend, ten years her senior, for a 32-year-old unemployed athlete, despite the older man’s obedient commitment to swallowing frequent doses of Viagra. “Now I get sex six times a day”, said Carmen. “But I do miss going to the opera”. Source: The New York Times, Pi.

We should remind ourselves that a significant number of high-spending consumers (though it’s not actually their money) are a lot younger than us. Mere children, in fact.

The Consumer Insight column looks at the headline above, and winces. Today, Maurice Chevalier’s lyric from the 1951 musical Gigi! resonates with a decidedly queasy tone. Back then no-one much imagined a culture that could produce pouting Bratz dolls and catwalk-ready six-year-olds.

Nonetheless, at least one company that caters to juvenile consumer appetites has reason to “thank Heaven for little girls”. Then again, maybe their thanks should go to Andy Mooney, for his intuitive understanding of what makes girl-children squeal with delight and tug their mothers’ sleeves.

Mr. Mooney was the former Nike manager who was brought in seven years ago to rescue Disney Consumer Products, where sales were slipping by 30% a year. He arrived with a magic wand in his pocket. A month into his new job, he went to a “Disney On Ice” show, and noticed long entrance lines of small girls, all dressed up in thrown-together ‘princess’ costumes. Mooney thought this looked like latent demand, and briefed his production and marketing team with a swatch of colours and a sheaf of draft license agreements. “We’re going to help these little girls to do what they’re doing anyway”, said the sport-shoe seer. “To project themselves into characters from our classic movies”. (more…)

The financial industries have good reason to wean us all off cash, and to push credit cards and other forms of non-specie payment. It saves them …well, money. The minting, counting and administering of banknotes and coinage rises in cost every year. By contrast, the progressive switch to plastic and other digitally-denominated forms of payment is relentlessly driven by Moore’s Law, which cuts the cost of computer processing power approximately by half every eighteen months. Result: ever-cheaper digital transactions. The European Union estimates a saving of 50 billion Euros ($65 billion US) per year if cash were to vanish overnight. Visa and MasterCard are doing their bit by introducing plastic cards for paying bills under $25, which require neither a customer signature nor a PIN number. Now mobile phones are becoming a payment method. A few hundred thousand Japanese already pay for groceries, cinema tickets and rail travel by passing their telephone handsets over a “phone-reader” and waiting for the endearingly old-fashioned “ka-ching” noise that signals a successful payment. The death of cash? Not so fast, friends, keep a hold on your billfolds. Electronic money movements can be monitored, and the anonymity of folding-money will always remain popular with those of us who don’t want to leave a digital trail revealing our transactions to prying eyes. Source: The Economist, Pi.

Depressing news for those who believe that “voting in elections is the most important thing you will ever do”. A recent ballot-count revealed that more British people voted for contestants in reality TV shows like “Pop Idol” and “Big Brother” than the number who voted in national elections. Who says politics is getting trivialized? C’mon, let’s stick to the serious issues here! Source: Rory Stewart writing in The New York Times, Pi.

Fascinating facts can be gleaned from the world’s census data. Americans have annually been drinking over 23 gallons per capita of bottled water, (which isn’t fattening), in other words a statistically higher ‘share-of-bladder’ than their consumption of beer, (which is). This may partly explain why the obesity-gap between Americans and Australians, Britons, Greeks, New Zealanders and Mexicans is closing. Maybe those nations, too, are aiming at the 64 days a year that Americans spend sitting watching TV. But wait! When US citizens do get up off the couch, it turns out to be a dangerous world out there. Bicycles are the US consumer product most likely to be involved in accidents, but lawnmowers and …beds (!!) follow close behind. Risky thing, leisure time…. Source: Census data, The New York Times, Pi.