SD#44: Packaging, pricing and procrastination
November 13, 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) Companies could benefit from prioritising ease over motivation Richard Thaler, a Nobel prize winner in 2017, has a simple mantra about how to change behaviour. It can be summed up in three words: make it easy. In 2017 psychologists from Columbia and Harvard universities did a study by launching a project to encourage parents to sign-up for a new service that would help their kids to study. They sent them the offering in three ways: a third of the group received the standard treatment by receiving a text message with the benefits; another third were told about the benefits and received a simplified sign-up process taking seconds; the final group were automatically enrolled and asked if they want to opt-out. The sign-up rates varied radically by group: 1% for the standard set-up, 8% for the simplified, and 96% for the automatic enrolment group. Later on, the same psychologists asked other experts to predict the findings and, unsurprisingly, experts knew that small barriers would reduce sign-ups, but they were wildly wrong about the scale of impact. Again and again, people underestimate the impact of friction. We think behaviour is most effectively changed by motivating people to want our product but, in reality, it’s often less important than making the desired behaviour friction-free. Richard Shotton |
2. (Marketing) Packaging doesn’t just improve the product, it is the product According to Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, Louis Cheskin, the man behind the decision to keep McDonald’s golden arches, believed that most of us don’t make a distinction –– at least not on a conscious level –– between the packaging of a product and the product itself. So, in other words, the product isn’t just the product… The product is the packaging and product. While Cheskin has long been dead, the firm he left behind has found that 7-Up can taste a hell of a lot more “citrusy” by simply increasing the yellow in the packaging by 15%, that peaches taste better in a glass jar than a can and that folks are willing to pay five to ten cents more for chocolate chip ice cream if the packaging reads, “New! Bigger Chocolate Chips!” A lot of us assume that a product’s packaging –– logos, design, aesthetic, copy, creative and the overall experience as a whole –– is to better help market the product. But, in reality, it’s to make the product itself better. Cole Schafer |
3. (Productivity) It’s fear—not lack of motivation or willpower—that prevents us from taking action towards our goals Procrastination is simply one of many coping strategies to avoid facing these fears. During high-pressure scenarios which trigger memories of negative experiences, the amygdala triggers a fight or flight response. It takes over our ability to think of the long-term consequences of our actions and leads us to avoid the important task at hand because it’s perceived as a threat to our safety. As a reward for escaping the threat by procrastinating, we’re temporarily relieved and feel better. But this doesn’t last long. Sooner or later, the negative emotions creep back up again—boredom, self-doubt, anxiety, stress and so on—and to cope with this, we continue to procrastinate until the last-minute deadline. This vicious cycle of avoiding negative emotions and rewarding ourselves by procrastinating is what turns procrastination from a one-off behaviour into an addiction. To us, procrastination is simply a matter of laziness. To our brains, however, it’s a matter of life and death. Mayo Oshin |
4. (Psychology) Could technology be stopping you from becoming the person you want to be? Technological liturgy – the formative power of the practices, habits, and rhythms that emerge from our use of certain technologies, hour by hour, day by day, month after month, year in and year out. The underlying idea here is relatively simple but perhaps for that reason easy to forget. We all have certain aspirations about the kind of person we want to be, the kind of relationships we want to enjoy, how we would like our days to be ordered, and the sort of society we want to inhabit. These aspirations can be thwarted in any number of ways, of course, and often by forces outside of our control. But on occasion, our aspirations might also be thwarted by the unnoticed patterns of thought, perception, and action that arise from our technologically mediated liturgies. They’re not called liturgies as a gimmick, but rather to cast a different, hopefully revealing light on the mundane and commonplace. The image to bear in mind is that of the person who finds themselves handling their smartphone as others might their rosary beads. The Convivial Society |
5. (Marketing) When calculating a deal’s desirability, consumers overemphasise the sum quoted and place too little weight on the time-frame Ever thought about why you see brands put “from £x per day” instead of month or year? In 2016, 500 participants were shown a car financing deal. Everyone saw the same image and basic details, but how the price was displayed varied between participants. Some people saw the price conveyed as an annual amount, others as a daily, weekly or monthly figure. On each occasion, the costs were the same if annualised. The results were clear: the longer the unit of time used, the less appealing the deal. This wasn’t a small effect. There was a five-fold variation in scores. Only 11% of people thought the car was a great deal in the annual variant. That jumped to 40% in the monthly condition, rose slightly in the weekly variant and peaked, at 51%, with the daily amount. Wherever possible, talk about your daily rather than monthly price. Or, if you’re selling multi-packs, don’t talk about the headline price; instead, emphasise the per-unit cost. Marketing Week |
6. (Investing) Sitting still feels reckless in a fast-moving world, even in situations where it offers the best odds of long-term compounding It’s like being told that you should play dead if a grizzly charges you – running for your life just feels more practical. The bias towards action is one of the strongest forces in business investing for three reasons: It can be the only signal to yourself and others that you’re not oblivious to risks. It can be the only signal to others that you’re worth your salary. And it can provide the illusion of control in a world where so much is out of your hands. One of Morgan Housel’s core beliefs of investing. |
7. (Psychology) We can’t prevent stress from happening, but we can get better at how we interpret the stress we do experience A team of researchers sought to determine the best way for helping teens address their stress. Because stress is often inescapable, the researchers wanted to focus on strategies that helped adolescents shift their perspective and meet stress head-on. They examined two key methods: the growth mindset and the stress-can-be-enhancing mindset. Growth mindset is the idea that our ability is not permanent, and that we can develop our skills and intelligence. In the context of stress, this “…casts normal but challenging stressors as both helpful (because they provide opportunities for valuable learning and skill development) and controllable (because the abilities needed to overcome them can be developed).” Stress-can-be-enhancing mindset is the perspective that experiencing difficulties and stress has benefits. Specifically, that stress stimulates physiological responses that help us optimise performance. In the context of stress, we “…can choose to take advantage of the enhanced capacity for performance it (stress) fuels rather than being worried and distracted by it.” Now combine the two into a synergistic mindset and instead of looking at stress as an entirely negative experience you can see it as a way to develop your skills and resiliency, as well as an asset that can help you achieve your goals. Psychology Today |
Fun things to click on:
A gallery of physical visualisations and related artifacts. Use Harvest’s timesheet template to track your day and understand where your time is going. How animals perceive the world and what can that teach us.
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