Category: Branding

💎 On the importance of brands signalling they’re interested in repeat business (tourist restaurant versus local pub)

What keeps the relationship honest, trusting and mutually beneficial is nothing other than the prospect of repetition.

In game theory, this prospect of repetition is known variously as ‘continuation probability’ or ‘w’. Robert Axelrod has poetically referred to it as ‘the shadow of the future’. It is agreed by both game theorists and evolutionary biologists that the prospects for cooperation are far greater when there is a high expectation of repetition than in single shot games. Clay Shirky has even described social capital as ‘the shadow of the future at a societal scale’. Yet businesses barely consider this at all (in fact procurement, by setting shorter and shorter contract periods, may be unwittingly working to reduce cooperation).

Yet there are, when you think about it, two different approaches to business. There is the ‘tourist restaurant’ approach, where you try to make as much money from people on their single visit. And then there is the ‘local pub’ approach, where you make less money from people on each visit, but you profit(?) more over time by encouraging people to come back. The second type business is much more likely to generate that + yield positive sum outcomes then the first.

Excerpt from: Eat Your Greens by Wiemer Snijders

💎 On irony in advertising (ridiculing conventional persuasive techniques)

Irony itself can be elusive to define, but in ads it usually means the ridiculing of conventional persuasive techniques. As far back as 1932, Jack Benny told this joke about the sponsor of his radio show: ‘I was driving across the Sahara Desert when I came across a party of people who had been stranded for 30 days without a drop of water, and they were ready to perish. I gave each of them a glass of Canada Dry Ginger Ale, and not one of them said it was a bad drink.’

Excerpt from: 100 Ideas That Changed Advertising by Simon Veksner

💎 On the long history of celebrities spreading social change (Queen Victoria and labour pains)

Women had been fighting a long battle for respite from labour pains, and the survey made it plain that the battle was yet to be won. For decades, there had been widespread opposition to pain relief in labour, because it was deemed to go against the word of God. (‘In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children,’ the sinful Eve was told – Genesis 3:16.) But two events started to turn things around. One was the discovery that chloroform had anaesthetic properties. The other was that Queen Victoria secretly called a doctor to the birth of her eighth child, Prince Leopold, in 1853 and demanded that he give her some of this new-fangled chloroform to get her through. The palace denied the event for several years, but it nevertheless helped to disseminate the idea that taking pain relief in labour was an acceptable thing to do.

Excerpt from: The Life Project: The Extraordinary Story of Our Ordinary Lives by Helen Pearson

💎 On making a claim more concrete to make it more believable (in this case by adding imagery)

Sometimes, increasing a statement’s truthiness can be as simple as adding an irrelevant picture. In one rather macabre experiment from 2012, Newman showed her participants statements about a series of famous figures – such as a sentence claiming that the indie singer Nick Cave was dead. When the statement was accompanied by a stock photo of the singer, they were more likely to believe that the statement was true, compared to the participants who saw only the plain text.

The photo of Nick Cave could, of course, have been taken at any point in his life. It makes no sense that someone would use it as evidence – it just shows you that he’s a musician in a random band,’ Newman told me. ‘But from a psychological perspective it made sense. Anything that would make it easy to picture or easy to imagine something should sway someone’s judgement.’

Excerpt from: The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things and how to Make Wiser Decisions by David Robson

💎 On messages from untrustworthy sources still having an impact (why propaganda works)

Amazingly, just the opposite is true for propaganda. If it strikes a chord with someone, this influence will only increase over time. Why? Psychologist Carl Hovland, who led the study for the war department, named this phenomenon the sleeper effect. To date, the best explanation is that, in our memories, the source of the argument fades faster than the argument. In other words, your brain quickly forgets where the information came from (e.g. from the department of propaganda). Meanwhile, the message itself (i.e., war is necessary and noble) fades only slowly or even endures. Therefore, any knowledge that stems from an untrustworthy source gains credibility over time. The discrediting force melts away faster than the message does.

Excerpt from: The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

💎 On making your audience think for themselves (f_____)

A key principle here is ‘the generation effect’ – that is, the finding that a message is significantly better remembered if the audience actually thinks it themselves, rather than just reading it superficially. Researchers at the University of Toronto assigned participants to one of two conditions: half of them read pairs of words that were associated in some way, such as rhyming or being semantically linked, like rapid-fast; while the other half were shown one word and the initial letter of its pair, like rapid-f_____. Afterwards, participants completed a test of recognition for the matched words. Those who simply read the words scored an average of 69%, while those who mentally generated the words scored 85%.

Excerpt from: Hooked: Revealing the hidden tricks of memorable marketing by Patrick Fagan

💎 On the need for ads to leave a little something for viewers to do (dot-to-dot)

My former partner Rich Silverstein used to talk about effective advertising using the analogy of those dot-to-dot games we all used to play as children. I’m sure you remember joining numbered dot to numbered dot. trying to guess what you’re drawing as the picture slowly emerges. Dot, to dot, to dot… then, with just one stroke of the pencil, it is suddenly clear. You have a picture of a badger. Silverstein always used to say that it was important for us to join enough of the dots in our advertising to avoid confusion (and as a result rejection), but to leave enough dots for the viewers or listeners to join for themselves. Into the gaps between the dots of advertising they should insert their own experience, hopes, fears, joys, and sorrows, and thus embrace the communication by becoming a part of it.

Excerpt from: Perfect Pitch: The Art of Selling Ideas and Winning New Business by Jon Steel