SD#46: Brevity, optimism and attention
November 27, 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) There’s plentiful research to show buyers don’t make purchases logically, yet B2B marketers still try to make sales largely based on product features Back in the Dark Ages, economists believed that humans were ‘utility-maximising’ automatons that made decisions based on a series of cost/benefit calculations. But in 1956 a genius named Herbert Simon proved that most humans are satisficers, who tend to choose the first acceptable solution over the best possible solution. We satisfice to conserve mental and physical energy, and because it works. We don’t have unlimited time or perfect information, so we settle for ‘good enough’. So what does this mean for B2B marketers? It means that your ads don’t need to convey the superiority of your product, because that’s not the key factor that drives buying behaviour. Buyers don’t want the best possible product, buyers want good-enough products that come to mind easily (mental availability) and are easy to purchase (physical availability). When B2B buyers need a new financial service, 47% go straight to their existing bank, and 75% of those who claim to shop around also end up with their existing bank. And most buyers don’t even consider more than two brands. The truly rational B2B buyer would consider dozens of banks, compare their product specifications and prices, and choose the best possible option. The truly lazy B2B buyer would default to the brand they already know, which is what all of us do in practice. The problem isn’t that buyers don’t know enough about your products. The problem is that buyers don’t know your brand exists. And marketing exists to solve that problem. Marketing Week |
2. (Productivity) A few gems from Churchill’s memo named Brevity “To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time while energy is spent looking for the essential parts.” A couple of considerations from Winston that we could apply in our work: – The aim should be reports which set out the main points in a series of short, crisp paragraphs – If a report relies on detailed analysis of some complicated factors, or statistics, these should be set out in an Appendix – Often the occasion best met by submitting not a full-dress report, but an aide-memoire consisting of headings only, which can be expanded orally if needed – Let us have an end of such phrases as these: “It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations…”, or “Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect…”. Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word |
3. (Society) The case for optimism Pessimism sounds smart. Optimism sounds dumb. It’s no wonder, then, that pessimistic messages hit the headlines, and optimistic ones hardly get a middle-page snippet. It’s why doomsday thinkers get respect and accolades. They’re the smart ones that can see what the rest of us can’t. They’re the ones that speak truth to power. There is an “optimism stigma” that is pervasive throughout society. But the world desperately needs more optimism to make progress, so we should stop being so shy about it. The issue is that people mistake optimism for “blind optimism” — the blinkered faith that things will always get better. Problems will fix themselves. If we just hope things turn out well, they will. Blind optimism is dumb. And it’s not just stupid, it’s dangerous. Optimism is seeing problems as challenges that are solvable; it’s having the confidence that there are things that we can do to make a difference. People mistakenly see optimism as an excuse for inaction. They think that it’s pessimism that drives change, and optimism that keeps us where we are. The opposite is true. Optimists are the ones that move us forward. They are the innovators, the entrepreneurs, the ones willing to put their reputation, money, and time on the line because they see an opportunity to solve a problem. Pessimism blocks solutions. If we always believe that the worst will happen, then what’s the point in starting? If any action will fail, we should stick with the status quo. Follow the pessimists if you want the world to stagnate or regress. Big Think |
4. (Marketing) Why focusing on sales only is a silly tactic Sales are usually the ultimate corporate measure of success at most large organisations. We celebrate when a company breaks a billion dollars in revenues. And yet, once you break that focus on sales down, it becomes embarrassingly evident just how dumb an objective it usually proves to be. Sales are of course important but they are not the lifeblood of a company, profit is. Granted, to some degree operating profit is a function of sales volume. You have to sell X cars to make Y profit. But that should not justify the focus on X and the general ignorance of Y when setting objectives, shaping long-term strategy and directing marketing. The sales signpost points towards lowering prices, targeting the bottom of the funnel, running extensive sales promotions, making more products, creating more brands, geographic expansion and the relegation of the bottom line to an ancillary role within the business. I would argue each of these precepts makes perfect sense in a sales-orientated business, and yet each is very often a stupid move. When you look for that profit signpost, it will invariably point you in a more difficult, but more successful direction. It directs you to maintain a price premium and the branded differentiation that justifies it. It compels you to look for more profitable, protectable target segments and higher-priced, profitable products to service them with. It tells you that most sales promotions are a slow suicide and that, if you do make a sale at a special price, you should feel bad, not good, about it. The profit signpost tells you to slow down and sometimes step back; to understand strategy as a sacrifice. It leads you to kill products and brands in massive culls that severely impact the top line of the firm while liberating the bottom. For the surviving brands, the signpost tells you to invest in big, long-term, TOFU-boosting efforts on their behalf. To follow the profit path does not mean we ignore volume, but it does mean we relegate it to page six in the marketing plan, and put gross margins and operating profit on page one. The purpose of sales is to provide profit, after all. Mark Ritson via Marketing Week |
5. (Productivity) Hard work can’t ensure your success but a lack of hard work can ensure your failure Even many enthusiastic capitalists, these days, will concede that a lot of people are born on third base, that preexisting familial advantage can play a huge role in monetary success and success in any given field. Of course, chance influences everything we do within our various systems of achievement. People are smart and talented and work hard every day and never make it, while the idiot sons of privilege thrive and thrive and thrive. The question is, what’s the right thing to do in light of this information? Too many people seem to have concluded that the only thing to do is to devolve deeper and deeper into bitterness. That’s a great way to set yourself up for an unhappy life, and more importantly, it’s annoying for all the rest of us. We’re trapped in it too. The simple fact of the matter is this: you are embedded in a system in which you do not control your destiny, yet you must work to achieve better outcomes rather than worse regardless. Adult life, very often, consists of recognising that you can’t control what happens next and then setting about to try and control it anyway. Because while you may never be able to exceed the potential that is forced on you by chance and parentage and timing and the system, you can certainly fail to meet that potential. If saying that means that I’m guilty of endorsing an unjust system then our standards have truly collapsed. I’m sorry to pull the wise old socialist routine, but I’ve been involved in this political culture my whole life, and being a socialist never entailed a belief that anything we do matters or that we were exempt from the need to work. Freddie deBoer |
6. (Society) How our economies have transformed around attention Over the last decade, a great deal of attention has been paid to the problem of attention: a wide array of books, articles, essays, and documentaries have appeared to chronicle the disordered state of attention in an age of digital distraction. The curious thing about attention discourse is that it has been with us for longer than most would guess. Clearly, this most recent iteration is directly connected to the rise of digital media, but previous waves of attention discourse have preceded the advent of digital technology. A few patterns are happening within the society: (1) We inhabit a techno-social environment manufactured to fracture our attention; (2) the interests served by this environment, in turn, pathologise the resultant inattention; (3) these same interests devise and enforce new techniques to discipline the inattentive subject. If there is a “problem with attention,” what are its sources? Do we conceptualise the problem of attention as a failure of the individual, or as a failure of the techno-social environment? Who or what demands our attention and to what end? If we undertake a therapy of attention, in the interest of whom do we undertake it? Do our efforts to discipline our attention simply serve the interests of the system that has generated the problem in the first place or do they aim at a modest liberation from that system, reaching toward genuine human goods? Can we cultivate the skill of attending to the world for the sake of the world and those with whom we share it? We will not by our individual actions undo a techno-social order that is inhospitable to human beings given the sorts of creatures we are (communal, embodied, mortal, etc.). But we can become more alert to how we might have internalised the demands of our milieu and judged ourselves (or others) for supposed failures — failures which are in reality the product of a social order that treats the person as a mere component in a system ordered toward economic ends. Only then might we undertake a meaningful therapy of attention whose rewards may very well be illegible to the order whose demands have structured our attention and, for that reason, be ours to enjoy in earnest. The Convivial Society |
7. (Copywriting) A few storytelling tips from the experts (1) Cut the fluff, instead, try a “cold open” – jump straight into the action. (2) Create a hero that succeeds but success doesn’t come easy. (3) Build a world, JK Rowling said “there’s always room for a story that can transport people to another place”. (4) Layer on drama, when you don’t think something can get worse, make it worse. (5) Slow down. Before your story’s climax, pause to force your audience to lean in. (6) Use data sparingly but intentionally, if you use too many numbers none of them matter. (7) Build to one moment. The entire story should be designed to amplify one moment, what is it going to be? |
Fun things to click on:
A chart for starting out new healthy relationships. Drive and Listen, lets you drive around various cities and listen to the radio stations local to those cities. A list of tools for creators.
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