There’s your trouble. Discarded gum has a half-life almost as long as spent nuclear fuel rods. How big is the problem? A survey of street surfaces outside the city’s metro stations, and reported in the Washington Post, implies that there are around 70 bits of old gum per square meter on average. If the same concentration affects the whole surface area of Mexico City, Pi calculates that we are talking about 50 to 100 billion (yes billion) blots on the streetscape.

Where to start? The city’s co-ordinator of conservation for public spaces have vowed to scrub the historic central district clean of chicle deposits, and a crack team of gum-busters are attacking the blobs with steam jets and chemicals, starting in February. With hope in his heart, co-ordinator Ricardo Jaral Fernandez is also placing public trashcans in prominent locations, each blazoned with an exhortation to “love your city”.

Meanwhile, in a truly startling and radical development, the municipal government is giving notice that it plans to start enforcing its own recycling laws. By now, according to city planners, over 70% of the residents of Mexico City are supposed to be separating household waste for recycling. In reality, fewer than ten percent of the people in the capital do so. Entrenched attitudes are about as difficult to turn around as a supertanker in the Panama Canal.

Chewing-gum has been on sale in Mexico for over 120 years, and nearly all of it is unthinkingly spat onto the sidewalk. Changing the attitudes behind this behaviour means nothing less than re-shaping Mexicans’ attitude to civic pride. The initiative sadly sounds a little like Don Quixote tilting at gumballs. Pi wishes Sr. Jaral lots of luck with his praiseworthy attempt to change a century-old bad habit, and the shoulder-shrugging indifference that causes it.

At the top of the heap are those blogs written by truthful journalists, experts and informed commentators, many of whom have day jobs at reputable printed and online publications. Some of them (this one included), try very hard to propagate truth and informed commentary untainted by hearsay, innuendo and ideological baggage. They can generally be relied on to ensure that everything they publish comes from a reputable and believable source, and has been responsibly verified.

Other blogs dedicate themselves to spreading biased, twisted and often blatantly untrue “information” masquerading as “facts”. You can usually tell the latter kind by their ranting and self-justifying style, their poor spelling, and the clear impression they give that a case is being advanced for some “righteous” (that tell-tale word!) cause, sect or interest group.

But people seem to love that stuff. One of the effects of the decline of newsprint publications and the inexorable rise of the internet is that many of us can now chose only to read the ‘facts’ and opinions that actively appeal to us. Faced with the massed ranks of the crazed, the biased, the finger-waggers and those whose beliefs are more important to them than what they actually know, millions of credulous readers nod sagely, and murmur “There, just as I thought”. Lunatic conspiracy theories have never been easier to spread. Look at the amazing ease with which the Bush White House convinced America of blatant untruths, such as Saddam Hussein being behind the 9/11 attacks. Look how many American voters were gulled into believing that the future president was a practicing Muslim.

If you really want to believe something, it will not take you long to find support for your cherished credo. The trouble is, that “proof” is liable to be a pack of lies. In the minds of many, “The Truth” is being supplanted by “My Truth”. Anything that challenges or undermines “My Truth” can easily be dismissed with “well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?”, or denounced as a vile conspiracy against the certainties of the righteously indignant. Indeed, if you’re lazy, you can dismiss everything you disagree with as “too much information”.

In early 2009, two ideas surfaced which may push the tide back in favor of truth-telling.

The first is the idea of endowments for reputable but financially troubled newspaper publishing companies. A team of financial experts at Yale University has noted that dwindling newsstand sales and slumping advertising revenues are forcing America’s best newspapers to slash their teams of international reporters, and are even putting some papers on the endangered species list. Migration of readers to internet versions of their publications is not doing enough to keep the news and comment coming, since web-based newspaper editions operate on a different and far less lucrative business model.

In an article titled “News You Can Endow” (New York Times 01/28/09), Yale’s chief investment officer David Swensen argues that “Enlightened philanthropists must act now or watch a vital component of American democracy fade into irrelevance”. Endowment funds, Swensen believes, is the only sure way of keeping these valued truth-telling publications in business.

The other welcome development is at Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia site. Wikipedia is a ‘wiki’, a website that allows visitors to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit content at their whim. Being voluntary, Wikipedia was launched with no real editor. Its driving principle is “This is my truth; what’s yours?”. The aim is not necessarily truth per se, but the warm, fuzzy feeling of consensus.

The flaws in this reasoning have just been exposed. During Barack Obama’s inauguration, Senators Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd were taken ill. Both recovered, but within minutes of the occurrences, items appeared on Wikipedia stating flatly that they had died. Whether the people posting these items were stupid, ill-informed or malicious does not really matter. Truth was the casualty. The site scrambled to correct the “mistakes”, and now appears ready to introduce a system of “flagged revisions”, which will subject newly posted “facts” to a system of screening and scrutiny. This will cost Wikipedia money, but it will do much to impede the spread of misinformation.

But the overall problem remains. Looking at the vast majority of blogs and internet bulletin boards, the innocent reader has no means of telling whether they are reading the truth, a biased message, a pile of garbage or a deliberate untruth.

Caveat lector.

Wandering around the aisles of your typical supermarket is a little like being guided by an invisible hand. The owner of the hand knows more about our peculiarities and foibles than we imagine. Psychological principles and mood-promoting devices are deployed in different ways depending where in the labyrinth you find yourself.

The first area you encounter is known as the de-compression zone, which mentally slows, and calms, you down before new stimuli are directed at you. If you are in a Wal-Mart, you will encounter a “greeter”, who makes you feel welcome and powerful, and at least in theory diminishes your propensity for shop-lifting (“It’s harder to steal from nice people”, as The Economist explains).

Less purposeful or more easily distracted shoppers may find themselves drifting from the entrance-way to the racks of good over on the left, where a “chill zone” will tempt you into browsing aimlessly through movies on DVD, books and magazines, and top-ten music discs. The idea is to enhance the receptiveness, acquisitiveness and relaxation of the shoppers who drift into this area.

If you ignore the dreamy entertainment option and instead march smartly from the entrance bay straight to your front, you will find yourself in amongst the fresh fruit and vegetables. In practical shopping terms this makes little sense, since filling the bottom of your shopping cart with lettuces, grapes, peaches and bananas before you load in heavy bottles, tin cans and boxes of beer risks squashing all that soft and vulnerable fresh produce to pulp. Surely they should have located the fresh fruit & veg at the end of your circuit of the store, not the beginning, right? A careless mistake by the supermarket layout experts, perhaps?

Far from it, it’s deliberate. Studies show that inspecting attractive and colourful fresh foods uplifts the spirits, and makes shoppers feel less guilty about buying less healthy indulgence foods later in the same shopping trip.

Why are ‘unavoidable’ needs and daily staples like milk, butter and eggs always at the back of the store, usually in the far corners? Simple, dummy. It means you have to walk past all the stuff you didn’t know you wanted in order to get to the stuff you can’t really do without. For the same reason, supermarkets with an in-store pharmacy nearly always locate them at the back, and surround the waiting line of prescription-fillers with aspirational and discretionary items like hair colorants. High-demand items and special offers are often placed at the half-way point on an aisle otherwise filled with relatively uninteresting goods. If you want the goodies, you have to walk past a welter of purchase options that otherwise might never have occurred to you.

Environmental factors are also drafted in to help us spend more. The fragrant smell of baking bread around the in-store bakery is a sales incentive in itself. For the same reason, you may find a pleasing aroma of fresh laundry wafting around the aisle stocked with fabric conditioners. Playing muzak tracks of French accordion music has been demonstrated to increase sales of French wine, while Bavarian oompah bands steer purchasers towards the bottles of Moselle and Liebfraumilch. Bundles of balloons put us momentarily in party mood, upping the amount of alcoholic beverages we are likely to buy overall. Dear, dear, what suggestible creatures we “hard-nosed shoppers” turn out to be.

The hidden message in the maze is that the seemingly random layout that drives us nuts and feels like the product of lame planning are actually highly sophisticated responses to the way our minds work when we’re shopping. If anything about our aisle-wandering habits is still less than perfectly understood by the supermarket chains’ ‘footfall experts’, mobile phone technology is coming to fill in the gaps. Path Intelligence, a UK-based company working with MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), has developed a system for tracking shoppers’ movements by their cellphones. The mobile handsets don’t have to be in use, only switched on. They track an individual’s precise whereabouts by the constant signals they exchange with the cellular networks that carry their calls. If you walk briskly past the household cleaning products, but then pause for a minute in front of Mexican Foods, Path Intelligence will know it, and record the duration of your “dwell time”. Apparently whenever dwell-time rises, sales of the items concerned rises even more, by a measurable factor. Standing and thinking about an item on a shelf increases our likelihood of putting it in the cart and paying for it.

If this kind of insight into in-store selling techniques is not common knowledge, there is a reason for that. Too much revenue depends on store-planners keeping their deeper secrets to themselves. Market research giant The Nielsen Company recently launched its Pioneering Research fir In-Store Metrics (PRISM). Major retail chains like Safeway and Walgreens have joined up, but Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer by sales value, declined, citing its “internal data sharing policies” – i.e. no sharing of its internal data.

Now where the hell have they hidden the shoe-polish?

Instead of waiting for Boxing day, stores are giving an early holiday gift to last minute shoppers trying to clear their inflated inventories. While this comes as a boon for shoppers looking for a deal, it bodes a sense of desperation for those retail companies on the verge of bankruptcy. Pi is the perfect tool for taking a look at retail’s core shoppers then identifying those who are bordering on the edge. Armed with this valuable information, companies are able to tailor an advertising campaign to attract those who might be “lost in translation.”

The staff at Pi is optimistically hoping for a happy and healthy holiday and a better 2009, both economically and altruistically. We think the brave new year starts on 1/20/2009.

Young people in Spain mix their spirits with Coca-Cola when they’re out for the evening. The Coke remains the same, but what booze goes in it can be very different.

A leading international Scotch Whisky brand (and Pi client) was deeply concerned that young drinkers in Spain were migrating from Whisky to Rum as their mixer …sometimes in the middle of an evening! Yet no-one could explain why.

Pi’s consumer insight research team ran the Pi-Charts. We looked at three groups:

1. Whisky only mixers
2. Rum only mixers
3. Whisky OR rum, depending on their mood

The analysis examined everything from demographics to lifestyle and leisure, and homed in on attitudinal data about fun and pleasure.

So what was the key differentiator between Groups 2/3 and Group 1?

The rum drinkers turned out to be Salsa music freaks!

Key insights always tell you something about consumers. But sometimes they have surprisingly little to do directly with your product.

In that Whisky/Rum case, it was something cultural: young Spanish drinkers with an urge to dance had a romantic notion about Salsa music and warm Caribbean imagery. All the Whisky brand had to do was change the soundtrack behind their commercials, and the defectors started thinking differently about putting Scotch in their Coke!

At the risk of seeming immodest, Pi had done it again.

MORAL: Pi says “keep an open mind, and let your curiosity run free. Beware of analyses, segmentations etc. which only talk about your product; you may miss the key insight altogether. Try Pi-ChartsTM instead!”.