Category: Product Development

💎 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

💎 On the importance of getting a representative sample (telephone survey to assess telephone ownership)

Particularly amusing is this recent telephone survey: a company wanted to find out, on average, how many phones (landline and cell) each household owned. When the results were tallied, the firm was amazed that not a single household claimed to have no phone. What a masterpiece.

Excerpt from: The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

💎 On our attention becoming scarcer in the age of information (inattention blindness)

In one study of simulated driving led by David Strayer and colleagues at the University of Utah, subjects talking on their phones “missed seeing up to 50 percent of their driving environments, including pedestrians and red lights.” (They were also ten times more likely to not stop at a stop sign.) Another experiment by Strayer and colleagues found that people talking on their phones had slower reaction times than drivers with a blood alcohol level at the legal limit.

What causes these mental deficits? The scientists blame inattention blindness, which occurs whenever the amount of information streaming into the brain exceeds our ability to process it.

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

💎 On the importance of seeking inspiration from another field (the invention of Velcro)

The idea for Velcro, conceived by George de Mestral, occurred whilst out walking his dog. Burdock seeds were always getting caught in his dog’s fur as she ran through the fields. De Mestral, an engineer, inspected further, and found the seeds hooked onto the fur with a series of microscopic loops. And so Velcro was born. It would go on to be used extensively, from children’s trainers to boots for the moon landing. Good dog.

Excerpt from: Brutal Simplicity of Thought: How It Changed the World by M&c Saatchi

💎 On our problematic obsession with the new (it’s not always better)

Just because something’s new doesn’t make it better. And just because you can do something, it doesn’t necessarily mean you should. We all know the advertising industry is obsessed with the word ‘new’, not just as a selling mechanism, but also a descriptor of its own corporate structures.

How many times have you read in advertising journals of the launch of a new agency with a new way of working? The advertising business is obsessed with the word ‘new’. Of course, ‘a new way of working’ with technology represents an embracing of evolving technologies and their opportunities, but sometimes in advertising we can behave like a child at Christmas who just keeps opening one present after another and never stops to play. It’s a case of: give me something new. New is good, old is bad. We talk about old technology as though it were bad and new as though it were virtuous. We need to have the wisdom to stand back and consider the gifts we’ve been given and how best to employ them.

Excerpt from: Hegarty on Advertising: Turning Intelligence into Magic by John Hegarty

💎 On how endings shape most of our memories (experiences are not remembered equally)

Experiences are not remembered equally, our memories are encoded with the experiences (both positive and negative) at their peak ‘most intense’ point and their ending ‘concluding moment’.

Participants experienced both of the following conditions:

Hand submerged in 14°C ice water for 30 seconds.

Hand submerged in 14°C ice water for 30 seconds followed by an additional 30 seconds while the water heated up to 15°C.

When asked which trial they wished to repeat, subjects actually counter-intuitively opted for the second, longer condition.

That is, exactly the same amount of time in the colder water, only to end a little warmer.

Excerpt from: The Unseen Mind by Ogilvy Change

💎 On why predictions are difficult (rounding errors)

In 1972 the American meteorologist Edward Lorenz wrote a paper with an arresting title: “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” A decade earlier, Lorenz had discovered by accident that tiny data entry variations in computer simulations of weather patterns—like replacing 0.506127 with 0.506—could produce dramatically different longterm forecasts. It was an insight that would inspire “chaos theory”: in nonlinear systems like the atmosphere, even small changes in initial conditions can mushroom to enormous proportions. So, in principle, a lone butterfly in Brazil could flap its wings and set off a tornado in Texas even though swarms of other Brazilian butterflies could flap frantically their whole lives and never cause a noticeable gust a few miles away. Of course Lorenz didn’t mean that the butterfly “causes” the tornado in the same sense that I cause a wineglass to break when I hit it with a hammer.

Excerpt from: Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

💎 On our tendency for lower comprehension of texts when read online versus in printed media (keep it simple)

In 1985, at the dawn of the computer age, the psychologist Susan Belmore conducted a simple experiment on twenty undergraduates at the University of Kentucky. The students were exposed to eight different short texts and then asked to answer a series of questions about what they’d just read. Four of the passages appeared on paper (a sheet of white bond, single-spaced, forty-seven characters per line) and four appeared on the monitor of an Apple II Plus 48k computer. Belmore was curious if reading the text on a screen might influence both the speed of reading and levels of comprehension.

The results were depressing, at least if you were an early adopter of computer technology. “These data indicate that reading texts on a computer display is not equivalent to reading the same texts on paper,” Belmore wrote. “Overall, college students took 12 percent longer to read and comprehended 47 percent less with computer-presented text.”

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

💎 On how progress is not completely objective (even in science)

Max Planck, the theoretical physicist who helped lay the groundwork for quantum theory, said: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

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

💎 On the myth of brainstorming’s effectiveness (versus working alone)

Researchers have gone to a great deal of trouble to test the efficacy of group brainstorming. In a typical experiment, participants arrive in a group. Half of them are randomly chosen to be in the ‘work as a group’ condition and are placed in one room. They are given standard brainstorming rules and have to come up with ideas to help solve a specific problem (perhaps design a new ad campaign, or find ways of easing traffic congestion). The other half of the participants are asked to sit alone in separate rooms, are given exactly the same instructions and tasks and asked to generate ideas on their own. Researchers then tally the quantity of ideas produced under the different conditions, and then experts rate their quality. So do such studies show that group brainstorming is more effective than individuals working alone? Many scientists are far from convinced. Brian Mullen from the University of Kent at Canterbury and his colleagues analysed the efficacy of group brainstorming in this way, and were amazed to discover i the vast majority of experiments, the participants working on their own produced a higher quantity and quality of ideas than those working in groups.

Excerpt from: 59 Seconds: Think a little, change a lot by Richard Wiseman

💎 On the clash between creatives and researchers (artists and scientists)

As John Ward of England’s B&B Dorland noted, “Advertising is a craft executed by people who aspire to be artists, but is assessed by those who aspire to be scientists. I cannot imagine any human relationship more perfectly designed to produce total mayhem.”

Excerpt from: Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: The Classic Guide to Creating Great Ads by Luke Sullivan and Sam Bennett

💎 On using humour in negotiations to make it more likely to get what you want (laughing all the way to the bank)

An elaborate multivariate analysis showed:

The results provide firm support for the major hypothesis that verbal humor leads to greater compliance. Subjects who received a demand accompanied by humor made greater financial concessions than no-humor subjects… Humor was equally effective as an influence technique when used by both sexes, and when directed toward both sexes. Our compliance data provided no evidence that joking was more appropriate for males.

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

💎 On there being no magic number of times an activity needs to be done to fix a bad habit (just keep doing it)

Contrary to popular belief, there isn’t a magic number of repetitions that result in a habit forming. Some say that you need to repeat an action fifty times or for twenty-one days, but very few researchers have actually looked at this question systematically. And those that have done tend to find that there isn’t a clear-cut answer to the question. In one of the few studies to have tracked the formation of healthy habits in real-world settings, researchers studied ninety-six students who had just moved to university and were encouraged to repeat behaviours in response to consistent cues (such as ‘going for a walk after breakfast’). They found that habits formed in some of the students after eighteen days, but for some it took much longer – up to 254 days. The average was sixty-six days.

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

💎 On producing content being the easy part (getting anyone to listen is the hard part)

Ideas that are allocated no attention at all – those that are never exposed to anyone – make no impact on the world, by logical extension, since no one sees them. The 50 per cent of YouTube videos with less than 500 views don’t individually make much impact on culture. So attention is a powerful thing – but what kind of thing is it?

Excerpt from: Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising for a Digital World by Faris Yakob

💎 On how we learn through mimicry (observing others guide for action)

Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.

Excerpt from: The Advertising Effect: How to Change Behaviour by Adam Ferrier

💎 On smartness not being enough to succeed in the jobs market in a hyper connected world

A hyper-connected world means the talent pool you compete in has gone from hundreds or thousands spanning your town to millions or billions spanning the globe. This is especially true for jobs that rely on working with your head versus your muscles: teaching, marketing, analysis, consulting, accounting, programming, journalism, and even medicine increasingly compete in global talent pools. More fields will fall into this category as digitization erases global boundaries—as “software eats the world,” as venture capitalist Marc Andreesen puts it.

A question you should ask as the range of your competition expands is, “How do I stand out?”

“I’m smart” is increasingly a bad answer to that question, because there are a lot of smart people in the world. Almost 600 people ace the SATs each year. Another 7,000 come within a handful of points. In a winner-take-all and globalized world these kinds of people are increasingly your direct competitors.

Intelligence is not a reliable advantage in a world that’s become as connected as ours has.

But flexibility is.

In a world where intelligence is hyper-competitive and many previous technical skills have become automated, competitive advantages tilt toward nuanced and soft skills—like communication empathy. and, perhaps most of all, flexibility.

Excerpt from: Mind Over Money: The Psychology of Money and How To Use It Better by Claudia Hammond

💎 On the value of operational transparency in product design

For example, the bright red Powerball in Finish dishwashing tablets, as well as the salient red centre of Anticol’s medicated throat lozenges, illustrates “this is the hardworking bit.” When we see these products there’s no question in our minds where the unique value or effort is. They’re practically radioactive. As Rory Sutherland writes in Alchemy, the same is true of striped toothpaste.’ Psychologically, the red, blue and white coloured stripes give us a clear signal that the toothpaste is performing more than one function, aiding the belief that this single toothpaste can offer the trifecta of strong teeth, fresh breath and …

Excerpt from: Evolutionary Ideas: Unlocking ancient innovation to solve tomorrow’s challenges by Sam Tatam

💎 On Oasis creatively avoiding having to issue refunds

When technical glitches marred their Manchester concert in June 2009, mega-band Oasis turned to the symbolic power of a signature to rescue them. Recognising the gig’s disruptions, the band sent out an eye watering 1m pounds worth of cheques in reimbursement. “People can obviously cash them in,” a spokesperson told the Manchester Evening News after the band offered the crowd a refund. Their genius? Anticipating that fans would never take them to the bank, every cheque was hand signed by Oasis frontmen Liam and Noel Gallagher. With pen and ink alone, the band saved themselves a fortune.

Excerpt from: Evolutionary Ideas: Unlocking ancient innovation to solve tomorrow’s challenges by Sam Tatam

💎 On the importance of timely feedback

For example, the clever people from Dulux paint recognised that an absence of visual feedback also wreaks havoc for exhausted DIYers looking to decorate white ceilings with white paint (it’s near impossible to know where you have already painted!).

Addressing this issue, Dulux created NeverMiss, a ceiling paint that goes on pink (providing clear feedback against white ceilings) and dries white, helping painters create a uniform finish. Likewise, to prevent ‘creepers’ edging over the speed limit, radar-enabled speed displays providing real-time feedback now reduce speeding by up to 10%. There are nappies that signal when they’re soiled, tissues that change colour when you’re nearing the end of the box, razorblades that turn green when it’s time to change the blades, and even tyres that wear away to reveal the message “change tyre” when your tread becomes dangerously thin.

Excerpt from: Evolutionary Ideas: Unlocking ancient innovation to solve tomorrow’s challenges by Sam Tatam

💎 On copywriting as a form of poetry

And why not? Indeed, I think the best copywriting is a form of poetry. We fuss and fret about the way things sound just as much as poets do. So study their techniques, see how they use language, rhythm and imagery to achieve their effects. Anyway, it’s good for you. What do they know of copywriting that only copywriting know?

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

💎 On the creative benefits of thinking like a child

Einstein was a great fan of this technique. He said that: “To stimulate creativity, one muse develops the childlike inclination for play.” Researchers at the North Dakota State University agree. They conducted an experiment where they asked 76 undergraduates what they would do if college were cancelled for the day. The interesting bit was that half of them were encouraged to think as if they were seven years old. These students were found to give much more creative responses than the control group.

Excerpt from: Go Luck Yourself: 40 ways to stack the odds in your brand’s favour by Andy Nairn