Product Gems

💎 On writing copy for a specific person not a demographic (it should be a conversation between two human beings)

All the while I have fixed in my mind a mental picture of who will read what I’m writing.

I don’t mean “AB males aged 35-44 with a promiscuous attitude to white spirits.” I mean I think of an actual person, be it a friend, neighbour or relation, who is in the target audience.

When I see that person in my mind, I know what will appeal to them.

That way I can write copy the way I believe all copy should be written: as a conversation between two human beings rather than an announcement from manufacturer to consumer.

Excerpt from: D&Ad Copy Book by D&AD

💎 On consuming the product (not the brand)

The foolhardy researcher who dared question the cola dogma was Read Montague of Baylor College of Medicine. In 2005 Montague conducted a scientifically controlled, double-blind version of the Pepsi challenge. Participants received two unlabeled cups containing Coke and Pepsi. They were asked to drink them and indicate which tasted better. The result—an even split between the two drinks, with no correlation between the brand of cola participants claimed to prefer beforehand and the one they chose in the study. Tasters could not distinguish between the two. These results horrify Coke and Pepsi lovers. They insist—science and double-blind tests be damned—that they would have been able to tell the difference.

Excerpt from: Elephants on Acid and other bizarre experiments by Alex Boese

💎 On how poor our recollection of taste can be (how context alters it)

It turns out that we actually have surprisingly little recollection (or awareness) of even that which we tasted only a few moments ago. In one classic demonstration of this phenomenon, known as ‘choice blindness’, shoppers (nearly 200 of them) in a Swedish supermarket were asked whether they would like to take part in a taste test.13 Those who agreed were then given two jams to evaluate. They were similar in terms of their colour and texture (e.g., blackcurrant versus blueberry). Once the shoppers had picked their favourite, they sampled it once again and said why they had chosen it, and what exactly made it so much nicer than the other jam. The shoppers were more than happy to oblige, regaling the experimenter with tales of how it was their favourite, or that it tasted especially good spread on toast, etc.

What many of the shoppers failed to notice, though, was that the jams had been switched before they tasted their ‘preferred’ spread the second time around. The experimenter was using double-ended jam jars in order to effect this switch unnoticed. In other words, the unsuspecting customers were justifying why they liked the spread that they had just rejected.

Excerpt from: Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating by Charles Spence

💎 On the mistake of thinking advertising has become harder (because it hasn’t)

It’s a puzzling form of self-deception, this. Comparisons across time are meaningless. Winning things gets neither harder nor easier. The increased sophistication of your consumers, real or imagined, will affect your competitors no less than yourself. There has never been a time when advertising was expected to do anything other than work hard.

To the envious practitioners of 2040, marketing in the 1990s will presumably seem to have been a doddle. How easy, they will think, how very, very easy.

The reason it doesn’t seem so now is because it isn’t.

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

💎 On complaints of information overload having a long history (an example from the 1860’s)

In 1860 a young doctor called James Crichton Browne spoke to the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh in language we would recognise today: ‘We live in an age of electricity, of railways, of gas, and of velocity in thought and action. In the course of one brief month more impressions are conveyed to our brains than reached those of our ancestors in the course of years, and our mentalising machines are called upon for a greater amount of fabric than was required of our grandfathers in the course of a lifetime.’ The roots of information overload run deep.

Excerpt from: Curation: The power of selection in a world of excess by Michael Bhaskar

💎 On consumers become less price sensitive when spending with credit card (we treat physical and digital differently)

Want proof? Consider an experiment conducted several years ago by Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester, marketing professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The pair organized a real-life, sealed-bid auction for tickets to a Boston Celtics game (this was during the Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish era, so the tickets were especially valuable). Half the participants in the auction were informed that whoever won the bidding would have to pay for the tickets in cash (although they had a day to come up with the funds). The other half were told that the winning bidder would have to pay by credit card. Prelec and Simester then averaged the bids of those who thought they would have to pay in cash and those who thought they could pay with a credit card. Incredibly, the average credit card bid was roughly twice as large as the average cash bid.

Excerpt from: Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes and How to Correct Them: Lessons from the New Science of Behavioural Economics by Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich

💎 On consumers being price sensitive in some areas but price blind in others (printer ink versus champagne)

Just setting the printer default to “draft” quality would save consumers hundreds of dollars a year. Yet few consumers do. Though many companies still sell cheaper ink refills, refills account for only 10 to 15 percent of the market. That means that 90 percent of printing is still done using ink that, according to the PC World analysis, costs $4,731 per gallon. You might as well fill your ink cartridges with 1985 vintage Krug champagne.

Excerpt from: The Price of Everything: The True Cost of Living by Eduardo Porter

💎 On creativity being more arrangement than originality (look at things in new and different ways)

Creation, argued Koestler, comes from syntheses of existing ideas; from looking at things in new and different ways. Think about creativity in art. The Renaissance wasn’t about the completely new, it was, as the name implied, a rebirth – it changed the world not through unblemished originality but by reinterpreting the art and learning of the ancients. Likewise Picasso’s art, that paragon of modernism, drew inspiration from so-called ‘primitive’ works. Koestler argued that scientific discoveries work in the same way, often using metaphors or ordinary things to make breakthroughs. Think about the water pump which inspired William Harvey’s ideas about the circulation of blood, or the strings in string theory. As Newton said: ‘if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’

Excerpt from: Curation: The power of selection in a world of excess by Michael Bhaskar

💎 On the tension between emotional and rational thinking (the Elephant and its rider)

But, to us, the duo’s tension is captured best by an analogy used by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his wonderful book The Happiness Hypothesis. Haidt says that our emotional side is an Elephant and our rational side is its Rider. Perched atop the Elephant, the Rider holds the reins and seems to be the leader. But the Riders control is precarious because the Rider is so small relative to the Elephant. Anytime the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the Rider is going to lose. He’s completely overmatched.

Excerpt from: Switch: How to change things when change is hard by Dan Heath and Chip Heath

💎 On cutting down inconsequential decisions to free up mental capacity for bigger ones (Obama knew this all-too-well)

It was exactly this kind of thinking that former US president Obama had in mind when he explained why he only wore grey or blue suits when in office. ‘I’m trying to pare down decisions’, he explained to Vanity Fair. ‘I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.’

Excerpt from: Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals by Owain Service and Rory Gallagher

💎 On our tendency to make decisions or judgements based on what we can remember easily (availability bias)

By behavioural psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1973. In their classic experiment, they asked people to listen to a list of names and then recall whether there were more men or women on the list. Some people in the experiment were read a list of famous men and less famous women, while others were read the opposite. Afterwards, when quizzed by the researchers, individuals were more likely to say that there were more of the gender from the group with more famous names. Later researchers have linked this effect to how easily people could retrieve information: we tend to over-rely on what we can remember easily when coming to decisions or judgements.

Excerpt from: The Perils of Perception Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything by Bobby Duffy

💎 On the stupid and hard-working (versus clever and lazy)

Here is the main thrust of Neil French’s e-mail: “The German General stuff used to divide officers into four categories: the clever and lazy, the clever and hard-working, the stupid and lazy and the stupid and hard-working. The best Generals, the Germans found, came from the clever and lazy; the best staff officers emerged from the clever and hard-working; the stupid and lazy could be made useful as regimental officers; but the stupid and hard-working were a menace, to be disposed of as soon as possible.”

Excerpt from: Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man by Rory Sutherland

💎 On advertisers not eating their own dog food (most people do not want to ‘join the conversation’)

Ask most marketing or advertising people if they themselves, outside of their professional life, have ever shared brand content, or used a brand hashtag, or got involved in making or editing or uploading their own experiences of a brand, or any of the other things that they often expect customers to do, the answer would be rarely, if at all. Yet they regularly expect other people to do them.

Contrary to what appears to be popular belief inside agencies and marketing departments, most people do not want to ‘join the conversation’ or take part in any interactive, two-way dialogue with brands, even in relatively high-interest categories.

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

💎 On the prevalence of hindsight bias (our memories are distorted)

Amos talked about research then being conducted by one of his graduate students at Hebrew University, Baruch Fischhoff. When Richard Nixon announced his surprising intention to visit China and Russia, Fischhoff asked people to assign odds to a list of possible outcomes—say, that Nixon would meet Chairman Mao at least once, that the United States and the Soviet Union would create a joint space program, that a group of Soviet Jews would be arrested for attempting to speak with Nixon, and so on. After the trip, Fischhoff went back and asked the same people to recall the odds they had assigned to each outcome. Their memories of the odds they had assigned to various outcomes were badly distorted. They all believed that they had assigned higher probabilities to what happened than they actually had. They greatly overestimated the odds that they had assigned to what had actually happened.

Excerpt from: The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World by Michael Lewis

💎 On the only vegetable that doubles as a piece of advertising (the carrot, a propaganda vegetable)

Note. I’ve read that the carrot is to return to its roots and go purple. Generations have grown up believing that carrots are orange, but in Egyptian, and later in Roman times, carrots were purple or white. In the middle ages they were also black, red and green. They have only been orange since the 16th century when patriotic Dutch growers favoured the House of Orange.

A propaganda vegetable.

Excerpt from: The Art of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher

💎 On danger of experts thinking that simple solutions are simplistic (Curse of Knowledge)

In other cases, compactness itself can come to seem an unworthy goal. Lots of us have expertise in particular areas. Becoming an expert in something means that we become more and more fascinated by nuance and complexity. That’s when the Curse of Knowledge kicks in and we start to forget what it’s like not to know what we know. At that point, making something simple can seem like “dumbing down.” As an expert, we don’t want to be accused of propagating sound bites or pandering to the lowest common denominator. Simplifying, we fear, can devolve into oversimplifying.

Excerpt from: Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

💎 On marketing’s love of military metaphors (so many less aggressive alternatives are under-explored)

The fact is that many of the most basic ideas about and practices within organizations, management and business culture are based on a relatively small number of images and metaphors that remain largely under-explored.

It follows that, only by excavating the metaphor and uncovering its implicit meanings, can we hope to undo some of the damage that outdated thinking can do to our workplace lives.

So, for a start it’s so, well, destructive. The language of war is filled with hierarchies, systems, the culture of “command and control” as well as being known for its generally rather aggressive and confrontational attitude to life and property.

To take the word “target” again: it implies that the “consumer” is little more than a battlefield to be fought over, and whoever has the bigger firepower and most control of their resources is likely to be victor.

Excerpt from: The Storytelling Book (Concise Advice) by Anthony Tasgal

💎 On setting better objectives (a goal without a plan is just a wish)

Well, because there is evidence from the IPA Databank that better objective setting leads to more effective campaigns. Best practice is to identify exactly what business results you want. And exactly what you need people to think, feel and do in order to deliver those results.

The Databank also reminds us that reach and ‘Share of Voice’ (SOV) are crucial. No matter how well thought through your objectives, or how good your creative work, a campaign can’t deliver unless it reaches enough people. It’s also unlikely to succeed if it doesn’t outshout the competition. These are basic hygiene factors, but too often ignored by the wishful thinkers of marketing.

So let’s stop dreaming. By all means let’s be ambitious. But root your ambitions in knowledge and reality. Remember: ‘A goal without a plan is just a wish’.

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

💎 On the fluidity of our buying behaviour (depending on mood and occasion)

Our ‘beliefs’ about brands are nowhere near as stable and consistent as we think. As Ehrenberg-Bass’s work with re-contact surveys has shown, individual opinions about brands are much more volatile than top-line tracking data suggests.

The overall percentage of people who agree ‘Pepsi tastes better than Coke’ might stay the same from survey to survey. But that doesn’t mean that individual respondents are answering the same way each time. Look at the data more closely, and you’ll see that people answer research questions in a ’probabilistic’ way. They may lean slightly in favour of one brand or another, but they don’t have fixed beliefs.

Behaviour patterns are similarly fluid and messy. We like to think that people divide into distinct buying groups. But look at long runs of data, and you’ll find that real-life buying behaviour is much more ’agnostic’. Buyers of premium brands also buy Own Label; low-fat buyers also buy full fat; Coke buyers buy Pepsi.

Our opinions about brands fluctuate depending on mood and occasion. And so do our brand choices. In the morning, we feel healthy and go for low fat. In the afternoon, we want chocolate.

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

💎 On the downside of real-time feedback (The Great Gatsby might never have been published)

Imagine the horrifying paralysis of trying to write a novel on a platform where the whole world has real-time access to each page. Critics brutalized the most famous novels of the twentieth century. The Great Gatsby came out to awful reviews— “unimportant,” “painfully forced,” “a dud”—and weak sales. Virginia Woolf called James Joyce’s Ulysses “a memorable catastrophe— immense in daring, terrific in disaster.” If novelists had perfect foresight of how the public would greet their work, they might never lift a quill or tap a keyboard.

Excerpt from: Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

💎 On the parallels between commerce and sex (heavy users are promiscuous)

Back in high school there were people who were “heavy users” of sex. Remember them?

They often had one characteristic in common — they were promiscuous.

They didn’t just have lots of sex with one person. As we used to say, they “got around.”

The world of commerce is like that, too. Heavy users in a category tend to be promiscuous. They tend to try lots of different brands in a category. They get around.

In his book How Brands Grow, Prof. Byron Sharp gives a good example of this. Someone who is a heavy user in the fast food category might go to McDonald’s 4 out of 10 times; Subway 2.5 in 10; Wendy’s 1.5 in 10; Taco Bell 1 in 10…etc.

Excerpt from: Marketers Are From Mars, Consumers Are From New Jersey by Bob Hoffman

💎 On the need to seek inspiration in different places to the competition (to beat them)

John Taylor of GM’s APEX department, which manufactures extreme concept cars, once explained why his department stopped going to car exhibitions. His main argument was that everyone in the automobile business goes to the same exhibitions and that is why they all come up with the same ideas. Instead, John Taylor and his team began to attend computer game and toy exhibitions, and fashion shows. If you think about it, it is easy to see that a car designer can find as much inspiration from a toy exhibition as a car exhibition. Probably more. And they probably had a better time, too.

Excerpt from: The Idea Book by Fredrik Härén

💎 On the misconception that slogans have to be short to be catchy (when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight)

It is a widespread misconception that a slogan has to be short to be catchy: in fact, a few extra words are often required to create a striking rhyme or rhythm – for example, it would have been quicker for FedEx to adopt the one-word tagline ‘Overnight’, but opting for the longer ‘When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight’ gave the tag its memorable turn of phrase. The line also captured the emotional state of the package-sender – a desire for certainty.

Excerpt from: 100 Ideas That Changed Advertising by Simon Veksner

💎 On the merits of borrowing a standard idea from another field and applying it to your own (baby buggies and fighter planes)

Inventor Owen Maclaren created the first collapsible baby buggy by utilizing the system designed for the folding undercarriages of Spitfire fighter planes from World War II, while James Dyson used the cyclone systems used to suck up sawdust in sawmills and applied it to the home vacuum (see also Fix Your Frustrations, page 96). Both revolutionized previously entrenched designs. A spiral ramp might be fairly standard in an inner-city car park, but it is highly remarkable as an interior walkway of a public art gallery. If you find a current system disappointing or inadequate, try borrowing one from another field.

Excerpt from How to Have Great Ideas: A Guide to Creative Thinking and Problem Solving by John Ingledew

💎 On the ineffectiveness of facts as a tool for changing beliefs (explains politics)

There is a long tradition of attempting to test whether the truth changes people’s perceptions, both in academic and campaigning work, but the results remain mixed and inconclusive. Some studies show no impact at all on perceptions when we are told the correct figures, while others show some impact on certain beliefs, but not others. And some show more marked changes. In one more hopeful, recent example from a study in thirteen countries, the researchers split the group of respondents in two. They told one half some facts about actual immigration levels, and said nothing to the other half. Those armed with the correct information were less likely to say there were too many immigrants. However, on the other hand, they did not change their policy preferences: they were not more likely to support facilitating legal immigration. When the researchers went back to the same group four weeks later, the information had stuck for most – although so had the policy preferences. This fits with long-identified theories that facts struggle to cut through our partisan beliefs or our ‘perceptual screen’ as Angus Campbell and colleagues outlined in their classic book, The American Voter, back in 1960.

Excerpt from: The Perils of Perception Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything by Bobby Duffy

💎 On the unintended consequence of public policies (motorcycle helmets)

In 1980, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) introduced spot fines on motorcyclists not wearing helmets. The primary motivation was to reduce head injuries, but it had an unexpected and dramatic impact in a totally different area: thefts. In the wake of the change, motorcycle thefts fell by 60 per cent, and stayed down.

You might think that if a person intended to steal a bike, this change in the law would not make that much difference: they just had to remember to bring a helmet with them, or to steal one, too. But, it would seem, most offenders did not do this. It was extra hassle, and required forethought. Riders often carried their helmets with them, rather that leaving them on the bike. In short, the requirement to wear a helmet introduced ‘friction’ to the act of stealing a motorbike, with dramatic consequences.

Excerpt from: Inside the Nudge Unit: How small changes can make a big difference by David Halpern

💎 On power of the placebo effect not being uniform (e.g. colour of pill)

As the medical anthropologist Daniel Moerman has documented, one of the important determinants of a drug’s efficacy is the colour of the pill it comes in. When people suffering the symptoms of depression are given the same drug in different colours, they are most likely to get better when the pill is yellow. Sleeping pills, by contrast, tend to be more effective when they’re blue.

Excerpt from: Born Liars: Why We Can’t Live Without Deceit by Ian Leslie