Bud Appleton may not (yet) have his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame like Homer Simpson, but he does have this in common with the TV superstar: he's a two-dimensional, animated-cartoon character. Bud's "Foodville" is a humorous outlet for The Hartman Group to break down the often sophisticated and complex world of consumer behavior into digestible nuggets of insight.

Consumers' lifestyle patterns of behavior are in a constant state of change and continue to evolve over time. As cultural anthropologists, we have been observing and documenting changes in decision-making, household dynamics, shopping, cooking, and eating and drinking patterns for more than two decades. We know how difficult it is to portray our observations, analyses, and insights—to get the key points across in a meaningful, concise manner—in a written form.

We have not been immune to changes in the way people want to consume information. It's very much a compressed world. Once document length was all about word count; now it seems messaging is about character count (and don't forget the hashtag).