SD#13: Decision-making, internet and unhappiness
April 10, 2022
Hi friends,
Welcome to the thirteenth edition of Seven Dawns, your weekly newsletter on marketing, productivity, psychology and more. As the newsletter is still in it’s infancy I will experiment with the way I send you ideas. Do let me know if you like or dislike something you see.
Our seven ideas this week:
1. (Marketing) Only 16% of people remember a particular TV ad. Marketers must codify everything to make it count Only 16% of advertising is both recalled and correctly attributed to the brand (according to a study by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of 143 TV ads[2]) suggesting 84% of ad spend could be going to waste if that’s replicated in the real world. It’s another sobering reminder that your audience doesn’t care about your advertising, so you’d better make it distinctive enough to make an impact and be well-branded enough so people remember who it’s from. |
2. (Business) Decision-making in most companies can be deeply flawed Most business problems that involve decision-making are usually solved using two lenses – market research and standard economic theory. Together they are supposed to provide a complete view of human motivation, the issue is that they are often misleading. On the market research front, I’ve previously discussed how people do not behave the same way they answer those questions. Standard economic theory on the other hand tries to contemplate not what people say they want, but what we think they should want. Behavioural economics has shown that this often provides an incomplete, and sometimes highly misleading, view of human motivation, often blind to things that aren’t quantifiable. Standard economic models will always assume that the way to improve travel is to make it faster, and the way to improve food is to make it cheaper or more plentiful. And so on. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this – except that it can often blind you to less logical, more creative solutions. Rory Sutherland |
3. (Internet) Today’s world portrays the internet as this overly positive place and any idea otherwise is irrational Web3 seems to be gaining momentum and discourse over the last couple of months. People are getting hyped up and while my knowledge of it is incredibly limited, I do believe they have grounds to be hyped. But when one talks about the positives of something new, they naturally tend to also focus on the negatives of the previous iteration. In this case, it is the Web2 that brought to our world some of the largest organisations of the world, creating more content than anyone could ever consume, dividing our society in several ways and also allowing independent creators to showcase their work. It used to be unimaginable for me to think that Web2 could ever be thought of as negative and to argue one’s case would seem irrational. But as we move towards something new, I realise how it hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows. |
4. (Relationships) Relationship success is mostly determined by what the two of you create within it rather than as individuals That’s the big takeaway from a landmark study that explores what makes relationships successful, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists have sought to understand what makes for a good relationship for decades. But most of those studies only measured a few variables at a time. This study analysed information on more than 11,000 couples, drawn from 43 data sets that tracked those partnerships for an average of a year, to determine the extent to which they could predict the quality of relationships and what measures would best predict that. CNN |
5. (Marketing) Good marketing always has the basics of market orientation, strategy and tactics Today’s marketing world tends to be swamped with tactics (communications). But any good marketer who started with the 4Ps (product, price, place, promotion) knows that it should only take up a small part of one P – promotion. Good marketing consists of starting with the research, defining different audience segments, who you are going to target, who you are not going to target, what message do you want to send to them, how will you do it, where and with what budget and only then delving into execution. |
6. (Mindfulness) Most unhappiness is the result of a compulsive focus on the past and the future Our minds like to be busy. They especially like to be busy with thoughts about the past, worrying about things we could have done differently. And our mind likes to be busy with thoughts about the future, feelings of uncertainty, and anxiety about what might happen. Mindfulness and meditation are there to make us present and focus on the here and now so we can understand how we feel outside the realms of the past and the present. |
7. (Marketing) Through online search, people tend to embark on two different types of activities – exploration & evaluation Most marketers tend to map customer journeys trying to understand how their target audience ends up buying the product. This is a completely rational thing to do. There are usually a number of customer journeys that come out of the process and digital channels (such as online search) play a big part in them. If Greg decides he needs a pan, he might do a quick search online to find out what brands sell pans. This way he would embark on exploration. Shelly on the other hand wants to buy a laptop and she knows several brands that sell laptops. She might choose to research the different laptops sold by Dell or Asus and compare them, in this case, she uses online search for evaluation. Marketers tend to overvalue online search for the exploration stage while undervaluing it for the evaluation phase. |
Fun things to click on:
Matt Shirley makes funny charts and graphs about pretty much every social interaction you’ve ever had. Die with me – the chat app you can only use when you have less than 5% battery. Write a line of text and hear it turned into music with Typatone.
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.
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Speak soon,
Tom