SD #1: branding, angry customers, Dunning-Kruger, and crypto

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January 16, 2022

Hi friends,

This is my first edition of Seven Dawns. As promised, every week I will send you seven short bitesized learnings that I found interesting and I hope you will too. Let me know if you have any comments or thoughts after reading.

Our seven learnings this week:

1. Brand is about trust. That is why peer recommendations and reviews are so important, customers need evidence that they can trust your brand. If you can show it in other ways, then that’s an instant win.

2. Following best practices means that you will never be the best and will end up in the sea of averageness. If you do end up looking for examples among other companies, work your hardest to improve the thing you copied. A lot of successful brands nowadays are improved copies of something that did not work.

3. Angry customers are the best customers you can have for feedback. Value every angry customer as an opportunity to improve things others will not tell you.

4. When it comes to consumers making a choice, making the wrong choice in B2C leads to regret, in B2B it leads to blame. If you buy a Pepsi bottle for the first time and don’t like it, regret for making a poor choice kicks in. If you choose the wrong supplier for your business, you will be blamed for the choice. That is why B2B decisions tend to focus on risk-aversion.

5. A little interesting fact from psychology that I did not know had a name – the Dunning-Kruger effect – a known cognitive bias that people with low expertise in a subject massively overestimate their knowledge of the subject.

6. Most items that we have today are improvements of things from around the 60s and before instead of new innovations. Faster cars, more efficient planes, better refridgerators, radios, TVs, computers, you name it. Businesses today have realised that the R&D cost of improving something is much smaller than inventing something new.

7. The key marketing task is to make a brand always easy to buy for every buyer; this requires building mental and physical availability. Well known principle in marketing popularised by Byron Sharp’s book How Brands Grow. Building mental availability requires reach, distinctiveness (clear branding) and consistency. Building physical availability requires breadth and depth of distribution in space and in time.

Other fun things to click on:

I’ve been fairly late into the crypto craze, but this intro into cryptocurrencies has made it a lot easier to understand. Advertising legend Bob Hoffman released this programmatic poop funnel and it is absolutely eye-opening. Having a tough day? Here is a fun joy generator.

Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.