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Americans play to win shocker

According to a survey by an independent research agency, SKOPOS, there are distinct differences between Americans and 'Europeans' (interesting that there must have been enough similarities between Europeans compared to Americans that they could lump Europeans together) with regard to mobile gaming.

Americans tend to play mobile games for much longer periods than their European counterparts, with 33 percent admitting to playing a single mobile game for more than twenty minutes at a time, compared with just 21 percent of Europeans.

This high percentage is backed up by the fact that 45 percent of US gamers 'play to win' - returning to the same game in an effort to beat previous high scores and retain a competitive edge. Just 17 percent of Europeans admitted to playing the same game to beat high scores.

Too busy doing my nails to earn a living...

A table appeared in Business Week (Sep 6th 2004) showing the pay gap between men and women in different European countries working full time, with results which were counter to what one might expect. The gap was measured in hourly pay of women aged 16-64 in full time employment compared to men:

EU average = 16%
Britain = 21%
Germany = 21%
Sweden = 18%
Norway = 17%
France = 13%
Italy = 6%

You would have expected the Nordic/North Europeans to be more equal than the macho Mediterraneans. When I first saw the chart I said to my husband half- jokingly (we were probably watching Queer Eye for the Straight Guy or something) that maybe the better dressed the men (ie the more men paid as much attention to their clothes and styling in the workplace as women), the less the pay gap. He said it could equally be 'the more Catholic' or 'the better the food and wine'.

Seriously though, maybe there is something about the acceptability of 'feminine' traits (interest in clothes, wine, food - Catholicism a more feminine religion than Protestantism? {discuss in no more than 2 pages of A4}) at work in some countries, versus the assumption in other countries that women are somehow too distracted by such frivolities to be doing their job properly like the dull, focused men around them.

Cell image

An article on August 3rd in the Financial Time's Creative Business supplement (subscription required), entitled 'Closing the Culture Gap', says that Samsung Electronic's European design centre's Masterpiece project, of four mobile handsets to replicate European concepts of high status premium products, failed to win over top management, because there is a less well developed market for premium products in Korea "and nowhere near the same sense that a phone can become integral to an individual's self-image and self-esteem."

As the person saying this is Harry Choi, who manages the European centre and who is presumably Korean, I hesitate to disagree, but it seems to me that Koreans also have a sense that their phone is integral to their self-image and self-esteem, but have a different aesthetic and design sense of what a phone that complements their self image should look like.

Take the jewel-encrusted Samsung T500, which was clearly designed to fit the desired self-image of a certain type of woman, but probably not a Western European woman. (It seems to feature mostly on Russian mobile phone sites now...). Apparently the British designers at the Samsung Electronic European design centre came up with a model for women modelled in a cool, heavy ceramic material - no doubt very minimalist and chic to a Western European eye, but possibly looking rather dull to Korean eyes. Another model was cased in wood, titanium and silver plate, to appeal to Jaguar car owners.

Having gone so far as to set up a European design centre in order to understand cultural differences, it does seem odd that 70% of their designs never reach the consumer. Failure of nerve by top management? Or is this the norm for design centres? Or were their designs not very good or not deemed commercially viable?

The Samsung T500