Pi-Consulting

The internet, among the many dubious benefits it has bestowed on Mankind, has enabled us all to lead double lives. No, we’re not talking, for once, about sneaking peeks at porn, but about virtual reality sites.

If you want to know more about the real world, take a closer look at virtual worlds, and the way people inhabit them. Join an online game world like Second Life, for instance, and you’ll see what Pi means. Second Life is a 3-D world jointly created by thousands of internet users over time. Once you’re there, you can re-imagine yourself as taller, better-looking and considerably more dashing than the prosaic reality you see every morning in the mirror. Re-cast as your cyber-double or virtual avatar, you can even sprout digital wings and fly, if you’ve a mind.

All of which would suggest that players who inhabit such virtual worlds might choose to leave behind the boring everyday business of working, shopping and hanging around in bars and restaurants. How wrong that supposition would be, however! (more…)

GREAT FALLS, Va.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–eBrain Market Research and Pi Market Research Inc. today announced the launch of a new Consumer Insight market research platform for the Consumer Electronics industry: the Pi-Chart(TM).

The innovative new joint offering goes beyond demographic, segmentation and perceptual mapping techniques to show consumer attitude patterns in an innovative graphic format. Deeper understanding of the values, attitudes and mindsets of key consumer groups offer CE manufacturers new ways of tuning and targeting their communications, thus boosting sales and optimizing Return on Marketing Investment.

The Pi Initiative (more…)

Parents of twenty-to-thirtysomethings are worried about their kids. Specifically, they’re worried that they are never going to leave the family home. Whose nest is it, anyway? Mum and Dad’s? Or the “Come-Back Kid’s”?

Ah, the joys of parenthood! The poor old dears have put behind them the mess, noise, turbulence and confrontations of having their teenage children at home. Now, all over Europe, the same mothers and fathers are reaching their 50s or 60s. However, ask them if the advancing years have brought them the quiet joys of being ‘empty-nesters’. They are just as likely to roll their eyes and murmur “I wish! They’re still here!”.

The number of “adultescents” still living at home is not trivial. Six out of ten British 20-to-25-year-old men are still shacking up at their parents’ place, according to the UK’s Office for National Statistics. For women in their young 20s the figure is four out of ten.

Significant numbers of Italians stay single and continue living in the parental home well into their 30s and even 40s, according to TGI’s international office in Geneva. The majority pronounce themselves perfectly happy with the arrangement. The French even have a name for such people. Stay-at-home young adults are called “Tanguys”, after a 28-year-old character in a movie who flatly refuses to leave home even when formally thrown out by his despairing parents. Bizarrely, young Frenchmen have even sued those who gave them life for “failing to maintain them”.

Whether they get called Papa and Maman, Vati and Mutti, Babbo and Mamma or Papi and Mami, the parents of a grown-up son still living at home are often pitied for being stuck with a “Mummy’s Boy”, or, worse, a cynical sponger who simply wants home cooking and a rent-free lifestyle. On the other hand, some mothers cannot bear to be parted from their “darling boy”, while some older fathers seem to like having someone to watch the football with. The come-back road carries emotional traffic in both directions.

Part of what keeps the no-longer-young at home is the growing difficulty of buying a home of their own. Since today’s 30-year-olds were born, house prices in Germany have doubled, those in France have risen ten times over, and British housing prices have multiplied by an astonishing factor of 15. Only the highest-paid youngsters can buy a first home and get onto the property ladder, unless Mumsy and Dadsy are willing to step in. Well-heeled parents who want the guest bedroom reserved for their guests have therefore been contributing to their offspring’s mortgages. Britain’s Council of Mortgage Lenders reveals that 40% of UK first-time home-buyers are getting parental help with the payments.

House prices are being pushed upwards by another new demographic phenomenon, the incredible shrinking household. British government projections show that in the next 20 years the number of individual UK households rises from 21 million to 26 million, with singletons a major driving force. As with the laws of physics, against the stay-at-home-with-Mum trend there is an equal and opposite Newtonian force at work; the rise of the one-person household. The actress Greta Garbo famously said “I vant to be aloooone”, and plenty of young people are picking up her theme.

Interestingly, young unmarried European men who live by themselves seem happy with their lot, though lone single males in America appear to have doubts about it; (TGI data again). The same source suggests that divorcees under 45 are quite content to go it alone, at least they are in Germany, Italy and the UK. Divorced American women appear generally content with their decision to “wash that man right out of my hair”. In France and Spain, by contrast, young divorced and separated people profess to be unhappier about life. Splitting up with a partner can be a big reason for deciding to move back into the parental home.

One of the big questions facing the parents of a “come-back kid” is how to treat their offspring’s boyfriend/girlfriend, who often wants to move in too. Suggesting they sleep in separate bedrooms is not only logistically difficult – average dwelling sizes are shrinking – but is also likely to be a source of inter-generational friction. Some parents have adopted a “don’t let them do it at home” policy, as one of their last available negotiating tools for avoiding their children moving back home. More parents appear to expect celibate behaviour of their girl children than they do of the men, which might explain why girls are often keener to leave home than their boyfriends are.

In general, however, the parental attitude to “nookie in the nest” is a tolerant shrug of the shoulders. One explanation for this is that post-WW2 ‘baby-boomer’ parents grew up in the inter-generational battleground of the 1960s and ’70s, and remember their own parents’ disapproval of their pursuing any kind of intimacy at home. Though they are now in middle-age, ‘boomer’ Mums’ and Dads’ attitudes have stayed significantly more permissive than the starchiness of their own parents. In some cases this is because they didn’t personally benefit much from the liberality of the Swinging Sixties, and have a sneaking feeling they should have done. Either way, their children are perhaps the first twentyish generation that doesn’t necessarily have to leave home in order to have a sex life.

It is clear that these changes are not only demographic. They have powerful resonance for culture, values and attitudes. For many young people, their primal urge towards success, go-getting and independence is being weakened by a growing addiction to stability, comfort, parental cosseting and low-cost living. The longer they stay home, the harder it is to escape the enveloping nest. Some evidence suggests that parents’ concern for their children actually increases with age.

All over Western society, a significant demographic group faces an uncomfortable question: isn’t it time you grew up?

Daimler Chrysler has sold off its Chrysler division for $1.35 billion, which sounds like a lot of money until one recalls that the erstwhile “automotive behemoth” sold two million cars last year for a total of $47 billion in revenues. The gaping disparity between the company’s turnover and its price-tag is accounted for by a vast health-care-and-pensions gap in the books. How are the mighty fallen, as employees’ twilight years suck the life out of the employers that hired them in the first place. As a result, Chrysler Corp. is now worth less than The Cheesecake Factory, Foot Locker and Pottery Barn. By some calculations, Chrysler is now worth less than Oprah Winfrey. (more…)

The Washington Post’s annual American “What’s Out – What’s In” report for 2007 has plenty to interest us social and attitudinal trend-watchers, starting with sexual mores and self-indulgence. Away with abstinence. Welcome back, pre-marital sex! Goodbye to driving drunk. Try driving nude instead! If you must wear clothes, pull your jeans up to waist-level; that off-the-butt look is now hopelessly old-fashioned. Out goes the ex-urbs McMansion. Now it’s a Designer Prefab in the “rur-urbs”. And so it goes on….

Perhaps the most striking switch is in TV audience allegiances. “America’s Next Top Model” becomes America’s “so-last-year” yawn. Who needs beauty? Make way for “Ugly Betty”! The eponymous heroine of this blazing new super-soap wears googy red spectacle frames, awful bangs and metal braces on her teeth that rival a barbed-wire fence for sheer rampant sex-appeal. It takes several hours in make-up to “uglify” the actress who plays poor Betty. (She’s actually very beautiful, natch, as wincing audiences will find out in later episodes).

How does Pi know this? Because we’ve seen the whole series already – in Spanish! The show originated as a brilliantly-written soap-opera (or telenovela) in Colombia, under the title “Betty la Fea”, or Betty the Ugly. Now it’s America’s turn to gasp in horror at how cruel nature can be to the female form, and to await the transforming happy ending, many episodes in the future. Oh, and she gets the guy. (Source: Washington Post, Pi Market Research)