Tag Archive for 'economy'

Behavioral targeted unemployment

Published
by
Donkey
on January 27, 2009
in digital and economics
. 0 Comments

People behave as their life is. Following a purchase decision of a random consumer in a convinient store might be fascinating waste of time. But getting a population and their stats for a study turns the deal a step easier to generalize.

Google.org, the charity organization or division of the Google, claims that they can predict the flu activity across the States. Online behavior connected with the large scale statistics turns out to be actually an accurate indicator what is happening over the world. The Boxlife made a small investigation into Insights and confirmed, that the economical crisis went as the media described. Or was it the media, who affected the search behavior of consumers - that will be left open to be discussed in several upcoming articles.

unemployment search query usa

The graph above shows how the queries for “unemployment” and related keywords started to slowly increase during the late summer 2008 in the United States. So far the peak was reached in early January 2009. An interesting decrease for the unemployment searches can be seen roughly at times when President Obama was elected, however soon after the search queries continued to increase.

unemployment search query uk

From the European point of view the same graph for “unemployment” query is different. Whether the queries began to increase later is difficult to say from the graphs. However, the behavior is more unstable compared to the American counterparts. Interestingly enough, it seems that Europeans enjoy more peaceful Christmas holidays than Americans: besides UK queries, the significant drop occurs in other European countries as well.

unemployment search query germany

When bringing the German graph, the line begins to change. However, the German equivalent gives the depth for this analysis. As the unemployment has been a severe problem in of the German economy for long, the financal crisis didn’t introduce significant change in the unemployment search pattern.

(Graphs sources: Google Insights for Search)

Protectionism and country branding

Published
by
Donkey
on July 3, 2008
in marketing and politics
. 0 Comments

Small and large countries play different game. A giant might dictate the rules of trading and war, but the small ones might bright by the imagination. But countries’ success is not only about politics and economy. It’s also branding - whether you and your country are desirable enough.

Today, the world is one market. Simon Anholt writes in the Monocle that the advance of globalisation means that every country, city and region, rich or poor, competes for its share of the world’s consumers, tourists, investors, students, entrepreneurs, sporting and cultural events, and for the attention and respect of the international media, of other governments and of people in other countries.

According to Paula Scher the USA is suffering from very poor image and low approval overall the world. Elsewhere Africa suffers from “continent brand effect” as the little knowledge on individual nations allows the continental picture dominate. But what the Switzerland holds? An image of mountainous and safe, thou expensive tax paradise?

Branding the nations is not fancy advertisements or PR speeches. Branding a nation is acting and actually changing the country. The perceived image might stay short while, but the experienced one lasts forever. If your river water is not clean enough to drink, your country is polluted. A beautiful poster won’t change the reality.

A good image seduces investments and tourists. Unfortunately politicians seem to be bad branding people. And bad decision makers as well. Otherwise all the countries would enjoy the status of Switzerland. Wouldn’t they?