Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends

by Martin Lindstrom

With 70 percent accuracy, my source tells me, software can assess how people feel based on the way they type, and the number of typos they make. With 79 percent precision, software can determine a user’s credit rating based on the degree to which they write in ALL CAPS.

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On a larger cultural level, where we live also determines our timeliness. For example, in Australia, you can be assured that your guests will show up thirty minutes late, often with friends in tow that they haven’t told you about. In Switzerland, guests are always on time, and if they plan on being five minutes late, they will let you know. Japanese guests will show up a half hour before they are supposed to, and in Israel, they will be forty-five minutes late.

Across many parts of the Western world, salt and pepper shakers take up a prominent space on kitchen and dining room tables. As everyone knows, most are uniform in appearance: three pinprick holes on the saltshaker, and a single one atop the pepper. If you live in Asia, however, the number of holes is reversed, with three on the pepper shaker and one on the saltshaker, thanks to the popularity of pepper in Asian countries and the cultural preference for soy sauce.

Today, 18 out of 45 customers entering a restaurant ask whether they can sit somewhere else. From that point on, their digital lives take over. Diners take out their phones and try to connect to the nearest Wi-Fi. They hunt down information or check if anyone “liked” their Facebook post, often forgetting that their menus are waiting there on the table, which is why when the waiter asks them if they’re ready to order, most respond that they need more time. Twenty-one minutes later, they’re ready to order. Twenty-six of them spend up to three minutes taking photos of their food. Fourteen snap photos of each other eating, and if the photos are blurry or unflattering, they retake them. Approximately one-half of all diners ask if their server would take a group photo and while he’s at it, would he mind taking a few more? The second half sends their food back to the kitchen, claiming it’s cold (which it is, as they’ve spent the past ten minutes playing with their phones and not eating). Once they pay their check, they leave the restaurant twenty minutes later, versus five minutes in 2004. As they exit, eight diners are so distracted that they bump into another diner, or a waiter, or a table, or a chair.

how and in what ways, do various cultures show off their flags? In contrast to Swedes, who almost never display their national colors, Norwegians and Canadians generally sport a flag decal on their backpacks, the latter making sure the rest of the world doesn’t mistake them for Americans.)

when I arrive at a new airport is handpick a taxi driven by a non-native. Foreign-born residents are likely to tell you the truth about a country and a population that natives can’t or won’t.

Denmark shows up regularly on magazine and online lists as “the happiest nation on earth,” yet every year tens of thousands of business professionals leave the country. In a nation of only 5.6 million people, where one in four Danish women admits to suffering from high degrees of stress, its hard not to believe that some lists can be misleading.

Danish kitchen manufacturers often use the term “Conversation Kitchen” to refer to an expensive, well-appointed kitchen that is used less often for cooking than it is as a theatrical backdrop for entertaining guests.

In an analysis of over one billion pieces of emoji data across the globe, across numerous categories, it wasn’t surprising to find that UK residents had the highest ratio of “winking” emojis, a means, perhaps, of compensating for their usual reserve.

Russia’s biggest downside, for me at least, is its lack of color. Being in Russia is like breathing different oxygen, and I can feel a gray shade pulling down over me the moment I board a plane to fly there. No one is animated. No one smiles, or laughs. Ask most Russians what they like most about visiting other countries and they’ll say it’s the sight of other people having fun.

Krasnoyarsk,

Irving Berlin was born in Tyumen, Siberia,

A Russian fashion consultant once told me that fashion stops at the Siberian border, where instead of showing off, the prerogative is survival.

locals leave their cars on all day knowing that if they don’t they won’t be able to restart them.

the more physical touching there is among people, the healthier the country is

There’s an iconic film in Russia wherein the protagonist comes home after work only to find he’s in the wrong apartment, and the wrong building, and the wrong city, but since everything in Russia looks the same, he doesn’t realize it, and now he has no idea how to get back home.

If a living place can be likened to a city, the art on the wall, or the lack of art, is the first sign

Across Russia, women have a much longer life expectancy than men, for one simple reason: alcohol.

In 1985, then-General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, cut back on nationwide vodka production and passed a law prohibiting stores from selling liquor before noon. Consumption and overall death rates both dropped. When communism fell, vodka became available again, and rates of consumption and alcohol-related deaths rose accordingly. Russian women aren’t teetotalers by any means, but the average life expectancy for Russian men today is around 64, the lowest of any country in the world outside African nations.

realized that the salt water was in some respects an everyday substitute for alcohol. Like alcohol, salt is highly addictive, and if they’re not actively drinking, alcoholics are often drawn to things—cigarettes, coffee—that give them the same rush, and that also hurt a little going down.

Whenever I visit the United States, for example, one of the first things I notice is that no one ever touches one another, especially the men. In America, touch is perceived as sexual. At the same time, American culture overemphasizes sports, especially football, which is one of the few places where men are given permission to touch, slap, wrestle, tackle and hug one another.

Russians and Saudis both expressed frustration with the leadership of their countries, and as many Saudis as Russians told me they would happily move someplace else.

paintings in Saudi homes all had as their subject matter one theme: water. Streams. Lakes. Waterfalls. Oceans. (It’s worth noting that Arabic speakers are four times more likely than other speakers to use flower and plant emoticons.)

“Desire is full of endless distances,” the American poet Robert Haas

Winston-Salem is still best known as the headquarters of R.J. Reynolds, which named a pair of popular cigarette brands after the city. Some locals, citing the city’s deep involvement with tobacco, call the place “Camel City.”

Karl Ove Knausgaard who, assigned to take a road trip across North America for the New York Times Magazine last year,

Lowes supermarket

the tacit tradition of making small talk with your neighbors springs from the desire to establish commonality, even if you’re talking about something as generic as the weather, or how the local sports team did last night. Small talk also has the secondary effect of defusing conflict or even resentment.

The Weather simply didn’t exist in Colombia. I later found out that no one asks or talks about the weather in Medellín, as it never varies, nor are there any television meteorologists. Every day the temperature is in the mid-seventies, with sunlight and an occasional cloud cover. Yet even in Southern California, where the same is true, natives talk about the weather constantly.

Americans’ reputation for friendliness is the absence of physicality. In the United States, no one ever touches anyone else and if they do so by accident, most apologize immediately. Physical contact is seen by many as analogous to trespassing on posted land,

In every other country across the world, guests staying at a hotel are free to open the windows in their rooms, with the exception of one: the United States. American hotel windows are sealed, or painted shut, or manufactured in such a way that they can’t open or close in the first place.

Visit any comedy club, or watch Bridesmaids, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy or Louis CK’s routines on YouTube, and you’ll realize that Americans pay comedians millions of dollars to talk about things most of them have felt, or thought, but never said in public. In

The multitude of options American diners face on restaurant menus isn’t just a smart business decision. It deliberately avoids offending all tastes, palates and dietary restrictions.

If most of the time they do and feel and think and watch and eat and drink precisely what everyone else does, are Americans really free?

deep

My Subtext Research revealed that the women I met cared less about the time they spent in their cars than they did about leaving the safety nets they called home. Distance wasn’t an issue; leaving the safe space was. In general, their lives as nonworking wives and mothers revolved around routines and rituals, with their cars becoming almost like small houses on wheels.

communities come together in the face of conflict and disagreement.

The houses and communities in North Carolina were more upmarket, carefully choreographed versions of the ones I had seen across the Russian Far East. How different, after all, is a look-alike house from a look-alike apartment building?

In common with Russia, American children seldom play outdoors. Russia can use the excuse of cold weather, but in the United States, the daily torrent of bad news from televisions and smartphones leads most parents to believe that murder or abduction lies at the end of their driveways. In both countries, men escape. In Russia, men disappear on fishing boats weighed down with cases of vodka. In American, men go golfing.

duplicity

Somatic Marker Hypothesis is a term coined by neuroscientist and author Antonio Damasio in his 1994 book Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain.

de-couple the animals themselves from the products on sale. This is a rule of thumb in the United States, but nothing you would ever see in Europe. Europeans have known extensive food shortages, and rationing, and Americans, fortunately, never have. When US tourists visit a marche or charcuterie in France, many are startled and even repulsed by the displays of meat and fowl

French and Italian hospitality industries, food service employees take pleasure in being the best at what they do. They may be the finest oyster shucker, the most knowledgeable vintner, an expert cheese purveyor. Toiling in an American supermarket is widely presumed to be a stopgap job, seldom a vocation.

Outback Steakhouse, the Australian-themed restaurant that has literally nothing to do with Australia (it was created in 1988 by four Florida businessmen).

BRICS nations—a widely used acronym referring to the developing countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—are often treated as indistinguishable, but nothing could be further from reality.

China places an emphasis on structure and operations, and creativity is all but nonexistent. India, by comparison, is all about creativity and chaos, with almost no attention paid to structure and operations.

Indian children are more likely to be malnourished than children from Zimbabwe, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s three poorest countries,1 and in Delhi, nearly 5 million school-aged children have irreversible lung damage from that city’s air quality, which is twice as bad as Beijing’s.

a new daughter-in-law is expected to cook, clean and, naturally, provide grandchildren, all under the oversight of her mother-in-law. An Indian mother-in-law sheriffs the household, exerting quality-control regulations over every aspect of domestic life. She knows what foods to buy, and the best recipes and cooking techniques. She knows the right way to hold newborn infants and to coax them to sleep. In some extreme cases, a new bride is forbidden to touch, or even speak in front of, their older relatives. The

daughter-in-law is invariably the person who opens the door and greets a visitor. Her mother-in-law waits inside, as she is, literally and symbolically, the proprietor and ruler of the home.

In general, we hang things—paintings, posters, mirrors—at the height where we best appreciate them. A painting is always slightly higher than the direct approach. We hang mirrors in such a way that we take in our faces, hair, neck and shoulders.

They hold the piece of clothing close to their noses and inhale a mixture of fabric, wind, soil, damp and the stiffening that comes from textures hanging outdoors in minus-degree temperatures. This aroma is by far the most popular fragrance among the Russian consumers I interviewed, and it explained the slow sales of a flowery-smelling laundry detergent. Floral scents not only had no emotional relevance to Russians, they made Russian men feel self-conscious. Ultimately, I convinced the laundry detergent manufacturer to get rid of the smell entirely. We then rebuilt the fragrance to duplicate the scent of cold air, soil and the outdoors, and the detergent began selling again.

know thy customer

Walmart, which owns and operates twenty Best Price Modern Wholesale