SD#43: Pricing, systems, and friendships
November 6, 2022
Hi friends,
Welcome to another edition of Seven Dawns, your weekly newsletter on marketing, productivity, psychology and more.
Our seven ideas this week:
1. (Marketing) People tend to evaluate prices in a relative, rather than an absolute, manner A product isn’t judged solely on its own merits but in contrast with a mental competitive set. If you can change that comparison set, then you can boost willingness to pay. One technique for doing that is to harness an idea called ‘extremeness aversion’. Say you’re selling two variants of your brand – a basic one and a higher-margin premium one. You can encourage sales of the premium line by introducing a super-premium version. One example comes from the now-defunct JJB Sports, which widely stocked Nike’s most expensive, super high-end football boots, despite rarely selling any. The store’s justification was that when they delisted these high-end boots it had a detrimental effect on its next most expensive pair. Shoppers felt uncomfortable buying the most expensive boots, as it felt wasteful. But they would happily buy the second most expensive pair as they could justify it as a relatively restrained purchase. Marketing Week |
2. (Productivity) An important function of almost every system is to ensure its own perpetuation Systems are the foundation of long-term results. You become efficient when you design a system for what you do. It saves you time and energy. A system for any area of your life will give you the freedom to do your best every day. Systems make life easier. When you commit to a system, you make real progress daily. Joe Frazier once said, “Champions aren’t made in the ring, they are merely recognised there.” In almost all areas of life, the temptation to jump to tactics, hacks and shortcuts is very high. Many people fall for it. “If you’re a writer, your goal is to write a book. Your system is the writing schedule that you follow each week,” says James Clear. What you do daily is how you are leading your life. If your present habits are not delivering the results you want, design a better system. Medium For an alternative point of view – How to live a chaotically organised life |
3. (Psychology) Friendships have a bigger impact on our health than diet Longevity expert Dan Buettner found that friends can exert a measurable and ongoing influence on your health behaviours in a way that a diet never can. “The most powerful thing you can do to add healthy years is to curate your immediate social network. In general, you want friends with whom you can have a meaningful conversation. You can call them on a bad day and they will care. Your group of friends are better than any drug or anti-ageing supplement, and will do more for you than just about anything.” The New York Times |
4. (Marketing) Brands which have a higher share of advertising versus their market share and competitors achieve higher growth Brands which secure a high level of consumer or customer mental availability are more likely to achieve stronger business metrics, including sales, customer acquisition and profit growth, according to a report by the Advertising Council. Mental availability, according to the report, has a direct impact on another surging marketing theme of global interest and its direct impact on business results: ESOV, or extra share of advertising voice. Essentially, it means those brands which have a higher share of advertising versus their market share and competitors achieve higher growth. Mental availability, ESOV and advertising attention metrics are combined into a new marketing science pot, still underpinned by the work first published in 2004 by Professor Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science on mental availability. The report focused on showing ESOV’s relationship with mental availability, which the study defines as “a measure of the breadth and depth of perceptions of a brand”. It’s not the same as top-of-mind brand awareness. With brands competing for memory, advertising plays a critical role in growing mental availability. Mi-3 |
5. (Productivity) Working with your doors open exposes you to what matters In the mid-1980s, Richard Hamming, a retired Bells Lab scientist, delivered his famous “You and Your Research” lecture, which summarized his 40-year-long career and attempted to answer the question “why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?” “I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing – not much, but enough that they miss fame.” You and Your Research |
6. (Society) Pursuing economic growth the green way Is it possible to pursue economic growth in a way that doesn’t make things worse for the planet and its inhabitants? Can we decouple growth from greenhouse gas emissions, the decline in biodiversity and the destruction of habitats? The prophets of decoupling belong to a motley but expanding crew of green-growthers. The green-growthers’ pitch is an appeal to the magic of innovation and technology. Self-described “techno-optimists” are vocal proponents of market-based climate policy (like carbon taxes and tradable permit schemes), “innovation economies” and “net-zero” pledges: corporate and government commitments to large-scale projects that would supposedly allow us to continue business basically as usual while offsetting emissions with carbon capture and storage, tree-planting, and other carbon-sequestration programs. Until the green-growthers can point to something, anything, that demonstrates their faith has helped realize a meaningful structural shift—not just toward compostable take-out packaging or shopping malls with charging stations in the car park but in the global economy as a whole—it is up to them to make the case, not their critics. London Review of Books |
7. (Psychology) Using expressive writing to heal trauma Expressive writing comes from our core. It is personal and emotional writing without regard to form or other writing conventions, like spelling, punctuation, and verb agreement. Expressive writing pays no attention to propriety: it simply expresses what is on your mind and in your heart. It pays more attention to feelings than the events, memories, objects, or people in the contents of a narrative. The connection between expressive writing and wellness has been explored by Dr James Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin. In his landmark research project, Pennebaker developed an expressive writing prompt to uncover the potential health benefits of writing about emotional upheaval. Pennebaker’s research project has been replicated many times with positive outcomes. The prompt and subsequent studies are often referred to as the Pennebaker Paradigm. To get started dedicate four days to writing a minimum of 20 minutes per day. What you choose to write about should be extremely personal and important to you. Write continuously: do not worry about punctuation, spelling, and grammar. If you run out of things to say, draw a line or repeat what you have already written. Keep pen on paper. Write only for yourself: you may plan to destroy or hide what you are writing. Do not turn this exercise into a letter. This exercise is for your eyes only. Many people briefly feel a bit saddened or down after expressive writing, especially on the first day or so. Usually, this feeling goes away completely in an hour or two. Psychology Today |
Fun things to click on:
Map showing the spread of dumplings. Top 50 productivity hacks chosen by the internet and you. Splasho’s Up-Goer text editor challenges you to explain an idea using only the dictionary’s 1,000 most-used English words.
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