Category: Product Development

💎 On the danger of industry navel gazing (look outside)

As I look at the advertising being produced at the moment, at least in Britain, it seems to me that much of it has been produced in total isolation from the real world. The prose style that’s used in press copy owes nothing to any other prose style except that used in other advertisements. The makers of advertisements seem increasingly obsessed by only one subject: advertisements. If this is so, then two consequences will follow. First, since the receivers of advertisements are only too conscious of the rest of the world – socially, politically, culturally, economically – then the advertisement will fail adequately to connect the advertised brand or service to that bigger, truer world. And second, imitation and lack of originality become more likely. Advertising is feeding, I think, far too much on advertising, and not nearly enough on the wider, far more interesting world outside.

Excerpt from: Behind the Scenes in Advertising, Mark III: More Bull More by Jeremy Bullmore

💎 On the importance of being interesting (not just being right)

She wants Mr. Interesting.

In the pub, who do you want to listen to?

The bloke who’s always right?

Or the bloke who’s always interesting?

Being right is overrated.

Because being right is seen as the truth.

But what is the truth?

The truth is whatever you believe it is.

And you only believe what you want to believe.

And you only want to believe what’s interesting.

Excerpt from: Creative Mischief by Dave Trott

💎 On the power of brand familiarity (friendship for the product)

Whether it is an impulse purchase like a candy bar or a package of cigarettes or an infrequent and highly deliberated purchase like a washing machine a refrigerator, a vacuum cleaner or a mattress, the biggest single thing that advertising can contribute is a friendly predisposition toward the brand—a whole complex of thoughts and emotions which give the purchaser peace of mind in the choice he makes.

We shun the unknown. We are naturally drawn to the familiar.

You might call this simply “friendship for the product”.

Your best friends are people whose qualities you like and admire and whom you enjoy being with— but they are usually people you see frequently.

The principle of frequency in advertising has long been recognized. Several great brands have been built around rigid adherence to this principle rather than through the content or power of any single advertisement.

Excerpt from: Leo: A Tribute to Leo Burnett, Through a Selection of the Inspiring Words that He Wrote or Spoke by Leo Burnett

💎 On the danger of prioritising the creative idea over the execution (the importance of craft)

The other big thing I learnt from John is the importance of craft. There is a universal fashion now to talk about the importance of creative ideas. If that means that good campaigns always have some kind of internal logic and coherence to them (even if that’s hard to put into words), I’ll maybe agree. But very often it sounds as if having the ‘idea’ is the only difficult, ‘creative’ bit, and the rest is mere ‘execution’. People respond to ads, however, not to abstract ideas: ads that exist in the full details of how they look, how they sound, the timing of the edit, the camera angles, the soundtrack, the lighting, every nuance of sets and propping and casting… and so on. If there’s such a thing as a ‘creative idea’ (which I doubt, though I don’t have room here to get too philosophical), we only know about it because of the execution that embodies it.

Excerpt from: Eat Your Greens by Wiemer Snijders

💎 On how innovative brands don’t start fully formed (bow ties at Starbucks)

For instance, when Howard Schultz launched what would become Starbucks, he modeled the stores after Italian coffee houses, a new concept for the United States. Schultz was definitely onto something, but the baristas wore bow ties (which they found very uncomfortable) while customers complained about the menus being written primarily in Italian as well as the nonstop opera music. What’s more, the stores had no chairs. The Starbucks experience that emerged from the many refinements and tweaks obviously looks and feels quite different from Schultz’s initial concept.

Excerpt from: Little Bets: How breakthrough ideas emerge from small discoveries by Peter Sims

💎 On how the sunk cost fallacy can lead to bad decisions (choosing fear of loss over enjoyment)

Hal Arkes and Catehrine Blumer created an experiment in 19S5 which demonstrated your tendency to go fuzzy when sunk costs come along. They asked subjects to assume they had spent S100 on a ticket for a ski trip in Michigan, but soon after found a better ski trip in Wisconsin for S50 and bought a ticket for this trip too. They then asked the people in the study to imagine they learned the two trips overlapped and the tickets couldn’t be refunded or resold. Which one do you think they chose, the $100 good vacation, or the $50 great one?

Over half of the people in the study went with the more expensive trip. It may not have promised to be as fun, but the loss seemed greater. That’s the fallacy at work, because the money is gone no matter what. You can’t get it back. The fallacy prevents you from realizing the best choice is to do whatever promises the better experience in the future, not which negates the feeling of loss in the past.

Excerpt from: You Are Not So Smart: Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, Why You Have Too Many Friends On Facebook And 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself by David Mcraney

💎 On how the safety of success encourages Hollywood sequels (Fast and Furious 928)

Take Hollywood, for instance: Among the ten highest-grossing movies of 1981, only two were sequels. In 1991, it was three. In 2001, it was five. And in 2011, eight of the top ten highest-grossing films were sequels. In fact, 2011 set a record for the greatest percentage of sequels among major studio releases. Then 2012 immediately broke that record; the next year would break it again. In December 2012, journalist Nick Allen looked ahead with palpable fatigue to the year to come:

Audiences will be given a sixth helping of X-Men plus Fast and Furious 6, Die Hard 5, Scary Movie 5 and Paranormal Activity 5. There will also be Iron Man 3, The Hangover 3, and second outings for The Muppets, The Smurfs, GI Joe and Bad Santa.

Excerpt from: Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths

💎 On how passing up short term wins can bring long term gain (frame the context)

Mark Twain tells the story of a young boy he met in the mid-West. Every time a stranger came into town the other boys delighted in showing the stranger just how stupid this boy was.

They’d hold out two coins, a dime (10 cents) and a nickel (5 cents) and tell the boy he could keep one.

He’d always pick the nickel because it was bigger.

Every time he did it all the other boys laughed.

Mark Twain took him aside and said, “Son, I have to tell you that the small coin is worth more than the bigger one.”

The boy said, “I know that mister. But how many times do you think they’d let me choose if I picked the more valuable one?”

In the original context, the boy is stupid.

Change the context, and he’s smart.

Excerpt from: Creative Mischief by Dave Trott

💎 On how survey answers can be swayed (by how question is asked)

For example, a questionnaire on the number of headaches people experience in one week was given to two different groups of subjects. One group had to indicate whether the number was 1-5, 6-10, 11-15, and so on, while the other was presented with the numbers broken down into 1-3, 4-6, 7-9, etc. The first group reported many more headaches than the second. Moreover, almost everyone is influenced by the two end points of a scale, tending to pick a number that is near the middle.

Excerpt from: Irrationality: The enemy within by Stuart Sutherland

💎 On speculation about the future often being pointless (as it is little better than chance)

It’s fun to speculate about what those inventions might be, but history cautions against placing much faith in futurology. Fifty years ago, Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener published The Year 2000: A Framework For Speculation. Their crystal-ball gazing got a lot right about information and communication technology. They predicted colour photocopying, multiple uses for lasers, ‘two-way pocket phones’ and automated real-time banking. That’s impressive. But Kahn and Wiener also predicted undersea colonies, silent helicopter-taxis and cities lit by artificial moons. Nothing looks more dated than yesterday’s technology shows and yesterday’s science fiction.

Excerpt from: Fifty Things that Made the Modern Economy by Tim Harford

💎 On how modern tech can weaken our memory (smartphone cameras)

But a 2013 study conducted by Linda Henkel of Fairfield University pointed in that direction. Henkel noticed that visitors to art museums are obsessed with taking cell-phone shots of artworks and often are less interested in looking at the art itself. So she performed an experiment at Fairfield University’s Bellarmine Museum of Art. Undergraduates took a guided tour in which they were directed to view specific artworks. Some were instructed to photograph the art, and others were simply told to take note of it. The next day both groups were quizzed on their knowledge of the artworks. The visitors who snapped pictures were less able to identify works and to recall visual details.

Excerpt from: Head in the Cloud by William Poundstone

💎 On how deference to authority can distort memories (status and height)

In the experiment conducted by Wilson on 5 classes of Australian students a man was introduced as a visitor from Cambridge University in England. However, his status at Cambridge was represented differently in each of the classes. To one class, he was presented as a student; to a second class, a demonstrator; to another, a lecturer; to yet another, a senior lecturer; to a fifth, a professor. After he left the room, each class was asked to estimate his height. It was found that with each increase in status, the same man grew in perceived height by an average of a half inch, so that as the “professor” he was seen as two and a half inches taller than as the “student.”

Excerpt from: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

💎 On how developments in seemingly inconsequential areas trigger much more improved developments in another (the hummingbird effect)

I have called this phenomenon “the hummingbird effect”: the process by which an innovation in one field sets in motion transformations in seemingly unrelated fields. The taste for coffee helped create the modern institutions of journalism; a handful of elegantly decorated fabric shops helped trigger the industrial revolution. When human beings create and share experiences designed to delight or amaze, they often end up transforming society in more dramatic ways than people focused on more utilitarian concerns.

Excerpt from: Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

💎 On the danger of grandiose marketing objectives (wishful bullshit)

Macho marketing language is common, but dangerous. And objective setting is where it’s perhaps most dangerous. Marketing plans are littered with words like ‘disrupting’ and ‘transforming’. Plans hardly ever use more modest, but more realistic, words like ‘nudging’, ‘reinforcing’ or ‘reassuring’ – they just don’t sound impressive enough. It probably doesn’t help that the box on the brief titled ‘objective’ has often been replaced nowadays by one called ‘ambition’ or ‘vision’. And when the brand plan writer won’t be there in two years’ time anyway, they may as well write wishful bullshit.

Excerpt from: How not to Plan: 66 ways to screw it up by Les Binet and Sarah Carter

💎 On the dangers of a mindless deference to authority (rectal earache)

Errors in the medicine patients receive can occur for a variety of reasons. However, a book entitled Medication Errors: Causes and Prevention by two Temple University pharmacology professors, Michael Cohen and Neil Davis, attributes much of the problem to the mindless deference given the “boss” of the patient’s case: the attending physician. According to Professor Cohen, “in case after case, patients, nurses, pharmacists, and other physicians do not question the prescription.” Take, for example, the strange case of the “rectal earache” reported by Cohen and Davis. A physician ordered ear drops to be administered to the right ear of a patient suffering pain and infection there. But instead of writing out completely the location “right ear” on the prescription, the doctor abbreviated it so that the instructions read “place in R ear. Upon receiving the prescription. the duty nurse promptly put the required number of ear drops into the patient’s anus.

Excerpt from: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

💎 On the cumulative power of multiple small improvements (professional cycling)

Brailsford and his coaches began by making small adjustments you might expect from a professional cycling team. They redesigned the bike seats to make them more comfortable and rubbed alcohol on the tires for a better grip. They asked riders to wear electrically heated overshorts to maintain ideal muscle temperature while riding and used biofeedback sensors to monitor how each athlete responded to a particular workout. The team tested various fabrics in a wind tunnel and had their outdoor riders switch to indoor racing suits, which proved to be lighter and more aerodynamic.

But they didn’t stop there. Brailsford and his team continued to find 1 percent improvements in overlooked and unexpected areas. They tested different types of massage gels to see which one led to the fastest muscle recovery. They hired a surgeon to teach each rider the best way to wash their hands to reduce the chances of catching a cold. They determined the type of pillow and mattress that led to the best night’s sleep for each rider. They even painted the inside of the team truck white, which helped them spot little bits of dust that would normally slip by unnoticed but could degrade the performance of the finely tuned bikes.

As these and hundreds of other small improvements accumulated…

Excerpt from: Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones by James Clear

💎 On how random clusters are mistaken for patterns (let the rice rain down)

To see why, stand on the carpet – but choose one with a pile that is not too deep (you might in any case want a vacuum cleaner to hand) – take a bag of rice, pull the top of the packet wide open … and chuck the contents straight into the air. Your aim is to eject the whole lot skyward in one jolt. Let the rice rain down.

What you have done is create a chance distribution of rice grains over the carpet. Observe the way the rice is scattered. One thing the grains have probably not done is fall evenly. There are thin patches here, thicker ones there and, every so often, a much larger and distinct pile of rice: it has clustered.

Wherever cases of cancer bunch, people demand an explanation. With rice, they would see exactly the same sort of pattern, but does it need an explanation? Imagine each grain of rice as a cancer case falling across the country. The example shows that clustering, as the result of chance alone, is to be expected. The truly weird result would be if the rice had spread itself in a smooth, regular layer. Similarly, the genuinely odd pattern of illness would be an even distribution of cases across the population.

Excerpt from: The Tiger That Isn’t: Seeing Through a World of Numbers by Andrew Dilnot and Michael Blastland

💎 On conformity having deep roots (nut cracking)

The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual. For example, one study found that when a chimpanzee learns an effective way to crack nuts open as a member of one group and then switches to a new group that uses a less effective strategy, it will avoid using the superior nut cracking method just to blend in with the rest of the chimps.

Humans are similar. There is tremendous internal pressure to comply with the norms of the group.

Excerpt from: Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones by James Clear

💎 On power of brand versus physical assets (you take the factory, give me the trademark)

Or, as John Stuart, chairman of Quaker Oats, said, “If this business were to be split up, I would be glad to take the brands, trademarks, and goodwill, and you could have all the bricks and mortar—and I would fare better than you” (in Dyson et al. 1996, 9).

Excerpt from: Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch. College Inc.. and Museumworld by James Twitchell

💎 On the problem with opinion polls (many opinions are invented on the spot)

One alternative would be an opinion poll. The drawback is that many “opinions” are invented on the spot to satisfy a pollster. Political scientist George Bishop once demonstrated this by asking people whether they favoured repeal of the “Public Affairs Act of 1975.” There was no such act. But thirty percent took the bait and offered an opinion. Bishop found that the less educated were more likely to claim an opinion.

Excerpt from: Head in the Cloud by William Poundstone

💎 On small changes leading to big outcomes (behaviour change)

In 2012 Facebook tweaked the algorithm to manipulate the emotional content appearing in newsfeeds of 689,003 randomly selected, unwitting users. Posts were identified as either positive’ (awesome!) or negative’ (bummer) based on the words used. In one group, Facebook reduced the positive content of news feeds, and in the other, it reduced the negative content. ‘We did this research because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product,’ Kramer says. ‘We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out. At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends’ negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook.’ Did tinkering with the content change the emotional state of users? Yes, the authors discovered. The exposure led some users to change their own behaviours: the researchers found people who had positive words removed from their feeds made fewer positive posts and more negative ones, and vice versa. It could have been an online version of monkey see, monkey do, or simply a matter of keeping up with the Joneses. ‘The results show emotional contagion’, Adam Kramer and his co-authors write in the academic paper.

Excerpt from: Who Can You Trust?: How Technology Brought Us Together – and Why It Could Drive Us Apart by Rachel Botsman

💎 On too much polling being bad for political parties (just like brands)

As a consequence, government too often moves from active to reactive — from thinking of new ideas to pandering to the latest popular trend. Public opinion, says Nadhim Zahawi, a Tory MP and founder of the polling firm YouGov, ‘used to be like a fine Scotch whisky: sipped and savoured occasionally’. Outside election season, Margaret Thatcher only received monthly updates on what voters thought, if that. Now, governments swig from that bottle every day.

You could argue that this helps them respond instantly to voters’ concerns. Yet all too often it leads to a focus on presentation over policy, and a willingness to back down in the face of noisy opposition (which itself is easier to put together in a more connected and less hierarchical age). As Zahawi says, ‘polls can only tell you how you should communicate what you want to do. They can’t tell you what you should do. Every policy creates a minority of losers, yet always the losers who are best organised and most vocal, particularly in an online arena.’

Excerpt from: The Great Acceleration: How the World is Getting Faster, Faster by Robert Colvile

💎 On more information leading to worse decisions (investment losses)

Why does this matter? There’s solid evidence that experiencing such losses—noticing that our portfolio is losing money—leads to poor choices. In one lab experiment by Richard Thaler, Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, and Alan Schwartz, subjects were far more likely to invest in a bond fund when feedback was given more frequently. Unfortunately, these low-risk bonds also generate lower returns over the long haul. As the scientists noted, “Providing such investors with frequent feedback about their outcomes is likely to encourage their worst tendencies…. More is not always better. The subjects with the most data did the worst in terms of money earned.” Such is the vicious circle of loss aversion, as our strong dislike of losses causes us to lose even more.

Excerpt from: The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior by Shlomo Benartzi and Jonah Lehrer

💎 On how we twist the facts to see what we want to see (personality tests)

Subjects were asked to complete a bogus personality test. The experimenter then gave them all exactly the same sketch of their personalities, which he claimed was based on their test results. When asked about the accuracy of the sketch, 90 per cent of the subjects thought it a very good or excellent description of themselves. People are so good at distorting material to fit their expectations that the identical sketch was thought by each of nearly fifty subjects to apply specifically to him or her.

In addition to trying unconsciously to confirm his or her beliefs, anyone who pays to see a fortune teller will have invested time and money: unless he has just gone for a lark, he will therefore want to feel he has got something out of it (misplaced consistency) and hence will be predisposed to believe what he hears.

Excerpt from: Irrationality: The enemy within by Stuart Sutherland

💎 On the damage of rewards (devaluing the task)

At the end of the last chapter, I showed that giving someone a negligible reward (or no reward) for performing an unpleasant act makes the act seem less disagreeable than it really is. One can also ask what is the effect of a large reward on the perception of a pleasant task. The answer is unequivocal: it devalues the task — in the eyes of those performing it. Nursery school children were provided in their playtime with brightly coloured Magic Markers and attractive drawing paper. Those who showed an interest in drawing were subsequently given the same apparatus in the classroom and encouraged to draw. One group was promised a glossy certificate for good drawing, while another was given no reward. Two weeks later the material was again provided and the children were told it was up to them whether they wanted to draw or not. The group previously given the certificate showed a marked decline in interest, while the other group drew as much as they had done in the previous two sessions. Presumably the children thought that drawing could not be of much interest in its own right if a reward was needed to make them engage in it.

Excerpt from: Irrationality: The enemy within by Stuart Sutherland

💎 On estimating how long a phenomenon will last (50% longer)

He made the assumption that the moment when he encountered the Berlin Wall wasn’t special—that it was equally likely to be any moment in the wall’s total lifetime. And if any moment was equally likely, then on average his arrival should have come precisely at the halfway point (since it was 50% likely to fall before halfway and 50% likely to fall after). More generally, unless we know better we can expect to have shown up precisely halfway into the duration of any given phenomenon. And if we assume that were arriving precisely halfway into something’s duration, the best guess we can make for how long it will last into the future becomes obvious: exactly as long as it’s lasted already. Gott saw the Berlin Wall eight years after it was built, so his best guess was that it would stand for eight years more. (It ended up being twenty.)

Excerpt from: Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths

💎 On getting controversial topics past censors (your boss)

But Marshall… not only admits his tricks… he seems to revel in them. On one episode of his [then] top-rated Laverne and Shirley series, for example, he says, “We had a situation where Squiggy’s in a rush to get out of his apartment and meet some girls upstairs. He says: ‘Will you hurry up before I lose my lust?’ But in the script we put something even stronger, knowing the censors would cut it. They did; so we asked innocently, well, how about ‘lose my lust’? ‘That’s good,’ they said. Sometimes you gotta go at ’em backward.”

On the Happy Days series, the biggest censorship fight was over the word “virgin.” That time, says Marshall, “I knew we’d have trouble, so we put the word in seven times, hoping they’d cut six and keep one. It worked. We used the same pattern again with the word ‘pregnant.’”

Excerpt from: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

💎 On stories persuading us more than bland stats (even for the most serious of matters)

Another frightening example comes from the realm of medicine. This time participants were given information on the effectiveness of treatments as a percentage of those cured overall (ranging from 90 to 30 percent). This is known as base rate information. They were also given a story, which could be positive, negative, or ambiguous.

For instance, the positive story read as follows: Pat’s decision to undergo Tamoxol resulted in a positive outcome. The entire worm was destroyed. Doctors were confident the disease would not resume its course. At one-month post-treatment, Pat’s recovery was certain.

The negative story read: Pat’s decision to undergo Tamoxol resulted in a poor outcome. The worm was not completely destroyed. The disease resumed its course. At 1-month post-treatment, Pat was blind and had lost the ability to walk.

Subjects were then asked would they undergo the treatment if they were diagnosed with the disease. Of course, people should have relied upon the base rate information of the effectiveness of treatment as it represented a foil sample of experience. But did this actually happen?

Of course not. Instead the base rate information was essentially ignored in favor of the anecdotal story. For instance, when participants were given a positive story and were told the treatment was 90 percent effective, 88 percent of people thought they would go with the treatment. However, when the participants were given a negative story and again told the treatment was 90 percent effective, only 39 percent of people opted to pursue this line of treatment.

Conversely, when told the treatment was only 30 percent effective and given a negative story, only 7 percent said they would follow this treatment. However, when low effectiveness was combined with a good story, 78 percent of people said they would take the drug. As you can see, the evidence on effectiveness of the treatments was completely ignored in favor of the power of the story.

Excerpt from: The Little Book of Behavioral Investing: How not to be your own worst enemy by James Montier

💎 On “decision by committee” leading to grey advertising (outcome is predictable and safe work)

Decision by committee needs to be scrapped. Group decisions are becoming more and more common in business, but when it comes to advertising, the result is often a very costly and public mess.

When the consensus of a large number of people has to be reached, the most likely outcome is predictable and safe work. “They sit there in committees day after day, and they each put in a color and it comes out grey.”

Allan Sherman, American writer and television producer.

Excerpt from: How To Make Better Advertising And Advertising Better by Vic Polinghorne and Andy Palmer