Product Gems

💎 On how little we remember (even about items we see so regularly)

However, if I asked you to describe a £10 note to someone who had never seen one so that they could create it from scratch, I’m guessing that you wouldn’t get very close to reality. Are the “£” and “10” in the same color? Does the word “ten” appear on the note anywhere? If so, how many times? How many digits does the serial number have? Is it printed vertically or horizontally? What pictures are there? How big is the note exactly? Your unconscious mind has the answers, but your conscious mind is evidently preoccupied with other things!

Excerpt from: Consumerology: The Truth about Consumers and the Psychology of Shopping by Philip Graves

💎 On confusing the quantity and quality of work (a lesson from Henry Ford)

This last point reminds me of Henry Ford’s reaction to a consultant who questioned why he paid $50,000 a year to someone who spent most of his time with his feet on his desk. “Because a few years ago that man came up with something that saved me $2,000,000,” he replied. “And when he had that idea his feet were exactly where they are now.”

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

💎 On why we don’t have full awareness of the reasons behind our actions (an evolutionary explanation)

A fascinating theory, first proposed by the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers and later supported by the evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban, explains that we do not have full access to the reasons behind our decision-making because, in evolutionary terms, we are better off not knowing; we have evolved to deceive ourselves, in order that we are better at deceiving others. Just as there are words that are best left unspoken, so there are feelings that are best left unthought. The theory is that if all our unconscious motivations were to impinge on our consciousness, subtle cues in our behaviour might reveal our true motivation, which would limit our social and reproductive prospects.

Robert Trivers gives an extraordinary example of a case where an animal having conscious access to its own actions may be damaging to its evolutionary fitness. When a hare is being chased, it zigzags in a random pattern in an attempt to shake off the pursuer. This technique will be more reliable if it is genuinely random and not conscious, as it is better for the hare to have no foreknowledge of where it is going to jump next: if it knew where it was going to jump next, its posture might reveal clues to its pursuer. Over time, dogs would learn to anticipate these cues – with fatal consequences.

Excerpt from: Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense by Rory Sutherland

💎 On communicating risks to others to change behaviour (are anti-drugs ads too formulaic?)

Public-education films in the rich world have historically focused on the risks to health caused by taking drugs. Several decades later, those campaigns don’t seem to have made much of an impact—and that is not surprising, given that the chances of dying of an overdose are fairly slim. The truth is that buying and taking illegal drugs probably won’t kill you. But it may very well kill someone else. Cocaine, for instance, is manufactured and exported exclusively by cartels that use murder and torture as part of their business model.

Excerpt from: Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel by Tom Wainwright

💎 On how willpower can be depleted (it’s not something that we just exercise)

So psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues put it to a closer test. People were invited to watch a sad movie. Half were told to react as they normally would, while the other half were instructed to suppress their emotions. After the movie, they were all given a hand exerciser and asked to squeeze it for as long as they could. Those who had suppressed their emotions gave up sooner. Why? Because self-control requires energy, which means we have less energy available for the next thing we need to do. And that’s why resisting temptation, making hard decisions, or taking initiative all seem to draw from the same well of energy. So willpower isn’t something that we just exercise — it’s something we deplete.

Excerpt from: Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

💎 On needing multiple techniques to understand a consumer (think about the big picture)

This is illustrated by the parable of five blind men walking into an elephant.

Each tries to describe what they’ve bumped into.

One blind man feels the side of the elephant.

He says, ‘An elephant is like a wall.’

Another blind man feels the elephant’s trunk.

He says, ‘No, an elephant is like a snake.’

The third blind man feels the leg.

He says, ‘You’re both wrong, an elephant is like a tree.’

The fourth blind man feels the tusk.

He says, ‘Sorry, but an elephant is like a spear.’

The fifth blind man feels the tail.

He says ‘You’re all wrong, an elephant is like a piece of rope.’

All of the blind men mistake their little bit of truth for the whole truth.

Excerpt from: One Plus One Equals Three: A Masterclass in Creative Thinking by Dave Trott

💎 On the balance between too much and too little choice (the inverted U-curve)

Take a simple study on pens led by Avni Shah and George Wolford, psychologist at Duke University and Dartmouth College, respectively. The scientists found twenty different pen options, all of which cost between $1.89 and $2.39 and contained black ink. The subjects were told that the pens cost about $2, but that they could purchase any of them for a special discounted rate of $1.

Here’s where things get interesting. At first glance, offering people more pens might seem like a good thing, since they can find the pen that best suits their needs. Some people like ballpoint pens, others prefer roller-balls, or just care about the texture of the grip. Sure enough, offering people more pens led to a higher percentage of people buying pens, at least at first. When only two pens were offered, 40 percent of students bought one. However, when there were ten pens to consider, 90 percent of people found one they liked enough to buy.

But now comes the inverted U-curve—when more than ten pens were offered, people became much less willing to choose any pen at all. The drop-off was steep: when there were sixteen different pens to choose from, only 30 percent of subjects bought one.

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

💎 On breaking the hedonic treadmill (appreciate the present)

You could call it the Paul Arden question: “How can people more fully appreciate the magic and wonder they already have around them?” As advertising experts, we are supposed to be the authorities on adding perceived value to things. So we should ask ourselves why the public’s appreciation of most things (especially those things provided by private enterprise) is so woefully low. Ask people about their mobile phone, their Sky+, their broadband connection… goods which would have seemed miraculous to our grandparents… and within a minute or so you’ll be listening to morose complaints about the monthly bill.

It seems to me that, if we were seeking gratitude rather than money, most capitalists would have given up the game decades ago. 60 years ago, under communism, a few million Russians were happy to die for the right to queue for a potato. Today, in a market economy, people who buying a microwave oven for £70 at 2 o’clock in the morning complain if they have a three minute wait.

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

💎 On the need for ads to turn viewers into accomplices (or they will be our challengers)

In his dense but thoughtful book, The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler says this: ‘Language itself is never completely explicit. Words have suggestive, evocative powers; but at the same time they are merely stepping stones for thought. The artist rules his subjects by turning them into accomplices.’

That seems to be as good a definition as I know of the role of creative people in advertising. We have to try to turn our audience into accomplices; because if they aren’t our accomplices, they will be our challengers.

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

💎 On why the true creative person wants to be a know-it-all (broaden your perspectives)

One of the best advertising people ever was Carl Ally.

He said the true creative person wants to be a know-it-all.

They want to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth-century mathematics, modern manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and lean hog futures.

Because they never know when these ideas might come together to form a new idea.

It may happen six minutes later or six years down the road, but they know it will happen.

Excerpt from: One Plus One Equals Three: A Masterclass in Creative Thinking by Dave Trott

💎 On the dangers of looking for formulas in advertising (you can’t be that mathematical and that precise)

In 1964, as reported by Denis Higgins in The Art of Writing Advertising, he was confronted by an interviewer trying to analyse just how and why he was such an original advertising thinker. Asked if there were any striking characteristics unique to talented writers and art directors, he said, ‘One of the problems here [in this interview] is that we’re looking for a formula. What makes a good writer? It’s a danger. … I remember those old Times interviews where the interviewer would talk to the novelist or the short story writer and say, “What time do you get up in the morning? What do you have for breakfast? What time do you start work? When do you stop work…?” And the whole implication is that if you eat cornflakes at 6:30 and then take a walk and then take a nap and then start working and then stop at noon, you too can be a great writer. You can’t be that mathematical and that precise. This business of trying to measure everything in precise terms is one of the problems with advertising today. This leads to a worship of research. We’re all concerned about the facts we get and not about how provocative we can make those facts to the consumer.’

Excerpt from: The Real Mad Men: The Remarkable True Story of Madison Avenue’s Golden Age by Andrew Cracknell

💎 On medical conditions (invented by advertisers)

In addition to the dread of auto-intoxication, the American consumer faced a positive assault course of other newly minted or rediscovered maladies – pyorrhea, halitosis (popularized by Listerine beginning in 1921), athlete’s foot (a term invented by the makers of Absorbiner in 1928), dead cuticles, scabby toes, iron-poor blood, vitamin deficiency (vitamins had been coined in 1912, but the word didn’t enter the general American vocabulary until the 1920s when advertisers realized it sounded worryingly scientific), fallen stomach, tobacco breath, dandruff, and psoriasis, though Americans would have to wait until the next decade for the scientific identification of the gravest of personal disorders – body odour, a term invented in 1933 by the makers of Lifebuoy soap and so terrifying in its social consequences that it was soon abbreviated to a whispered BO.

Excerpt from: Made In America: An Informal History of American English by Bill Bryson

💎 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