SD#47: Advertising, compassion and goals
December 4, 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) Advertising is like a mating ritual – impressive displays are more effective – which means consumers need to see what you’re spending on media and creative It’s not a revolutionary idea, nature has known it since the dawn of life on the planet – if you want to attract a mate, it pays to show off. So, in birds, time-consuming twig designs signal good genes. This works effectively as a persuasive technique. As biologist Amotz Zahavi concluded, anyone investing great time and effort in their message is putting their money where their mouth is – so they must really mean it. That’s why costly signalling boosts believability. As in the animal kingdom, we seem to understand instinctively that time and effort confer quality, and we apply this in our everyday lives. As Rory Sutherland has pointed out, we invite guests to weddings with a well-designed, carefully worded postal invitation. Not a group email. So how can we take a leaf, so to speak, from nature’s book, and apply this idea to advertising? One approach is to employ an impressive advertising spend. If you have shown visual or linguistic flair, it demonstrates the time and effort you have put into your campaign. That taps into costly signalling. In short, your task is to create through advertising the equivalent of a beautiful 6ft bower. That way you’re signalling the same: I am strong and clever. Pick me. Marketing Week |
2. (Psychology) Are we too sympathetic but not compassionate enough? These days, you could argue that in some ways, we are probably too soft. And the reason I think this happens is a confusion between sympathy and compassion. People mistake sympathy for compassion. Sympathy is feeling bad for someone and wishing they didn’t feel so bad. Sympathy is noble on the surface (“people should suffer less!”) but can often end up being subtly self-serving (“people should suffer less because I don’t want to feel bad for them anymore.”) Compassion is similar to sympathy but different in an important way. Like sympathy, compassion begins with feeling bad for someone. But instead of simply wanting the person’s suffering to go away, compassion involves someone willing to suffer alongside that person so that they may overcome their challenges. Sympathy is sending flowers and a card to a friend when a parent dies. Compassion is driving to their house and holding them as they cry. Sympathy is trying to remove as much strain and struggle as possible. Compassion is trying to help a person move through a manageable amount of struggle so they can grow into a better person. As a culture, we’re over-optimized for sympathy and under-optimized for compassion. Sympathy is easy to communicate online. It’s also easy to see sympathy communicated between others. Compassion is like sarcasm, it is not communicated well online. It’s also harder to recognize between others. Mark Manson |
3. (Marketing) How Amazon uses consumer psychology to get us to buy Rumour has it that Jeff Bezos reserves the head chair at their boardroom table for “the metaphorical customer.” The chair sits empty but whenever someone on the team suggests making a change that customers wouldn’t like, Bezos points to the chair and say, “what would they think?” Amazon is also famous for its experimentation culture. Amazon’s marketing team doesn’t guess what will work—they test, test, and test. Amazon’s insane growth is a result of its ruthless focus on the customer, its experimentation culture, and the team’s deep understanding of buyer psychology. Here are a few Amazon-approved buyer psychology strategies: Scarcity & Urgency Amazon has worked hard to position itself in the buyer’s mind as the online store with the BEST prices. (They even sold diapers at a loss for years to dominate the online diaper market). But on top of everyday good prices, Amazon sellers can use various deals to attract buyers. Limited-time offers create urgency and encourage buyers to act now. And Amazon also shows buyers when stock is running low, tapping into Scarcity Bias and driving sales. Foot-in-the-door Technique Amazon offers 1-2 day delivery and special deals for their Prime members. Rather than forcing buyers to commit to a membership upfront, Amazon offers a free 30-day trial. A free membership gets people to make a small commitment and get their foot in the door. Then Amazon showers new Prime members with benefits like special deals and free access to video Amazon’s video and music streaming services. Loss Aversion It’s estimated that the average Prime member spends $1400/year on Amazon. That’s a lot more than the average Amazon user, so Amazon uses clever techniques to retain Prime members. If a member considers cancelling their Prime membership, Amazon hits them with loss aversion messaging, showing members the exact amount of money they could lose by cancelling their membership increases retention. Social Proof Amazon sits on the throne of social proof. If we had to choose one buyer psychology that embodies Amazon’s rise to the top — this is it. Their product pages are riddled with social proof, from star ratings, reviews, buyer questions, and user-generated content photos and videos. Amazon is less worried about doing the selling and more concerned with letting their customer’s voices be heard. |
4. (Writing) How to get out of the creative block American essayist Vivian Gornick described her struggles with writer’s block in several places, here’s one example, from her 1996 book Approaching Eye Level: “I had been wandering around the apartment for hours, avoiding the desk. Couldn’t think, couldn’t write. My head filling up with fog, mist, cotton wool, dry ice; the fog rolling in through the window tops. The usual. The daily experience. The condition I struggle with from nine in the morning on, fighting to occupy a small clear space in my head until two or three in the afternoon when I desert the effort, feeling empty and defeated and as if I haven’t heard the sound of a human voice in a thousand years.” Blocks are a kind of brain fog, powerlessness and horror, a stupefying ennui. As Normal Podhoretz says, blocks are to the professional writer what jails are to the professional burglar: a normal occupational hazard which must be taken into consideration in the choosing of the profession and discounted, as it were, in advance. Blocks don’t afflict just writers, any ambitious creative work could be affected by a block. So how do you get out of it? (1) Try doing your very worst work. Do the worst song you can think of. At the very least you’ll get some idea of what your rules are, at the most you’re going to get something better than anything you’ve ever done because it has a lot of pure energy. (2) Do not turn one problem into another one. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed or inadequate that you stop working entirely, you have a problem and suddenly you have created another problem out of the problem. Resolving a block will not necessarily usher in a period of effortless, straightforward productivity – to the contrary, it often means going back to the most vexing, miserable stretch of work you’ve ever faced. Subtle Maneuvers |
5. (Business) Culture-market-fit model for business success All entrepreneurs want to know how to win. Investors all want to know how to pick winners. The issue is that no one can agree on how to do it either. Depending on who you talk to, you’ll hear different gospels espoused. Some are devotees of the cult of the founder. Simultaneously, some prefer the magic of frameworks. Their divine prophets are thinkers like Clayton Christensen and Michael Porter. What if the secret to building a successful technology company is culture-market fit? Culture-market fit (CMF) is that blissful intersection of an opportunity in the market with a culture that can execute on said opportunity. CMF occurs when an organization matches with an opportunity, and the organization’s culture allows the right strategies and processes to occur allowing them to capture said opportunity. Sometimes that will mean giving employees lots of freedom (Google), and sometimes that will mean micro-managing people (Amazon), but the important thing is that the culture cultivated correctly addresses the market opportunity. A company’s culture is a vibe, an ethos, that permeates every slide deck, every product decision, every analysis. When there is no clear right answer (which is always) the culture-market fit is what drives decisions. Culture-market fit does not mean that the organization is hyper-aligned with customer interests, either. CMF is determined by crafting the internal culture that wins the external market. Sometimes that is aligned with customers, but sometimes it is also done through more…company-oriented decisions. Exxon and Chevron and nearly every Big Bank regularly screw over their customers but are still fiscally successful over an extended period. Some companies are motivated by ethos, some by greed, some by hubris, but all winners match their culture and incentives to the market they are serving. A market opportunity is where a business can extract the most long-term profits, not necessarily the one that gives customers the goods or services they would most prefer. Napkin Math |
6. (Society) Companies talk the talk of creating stakeholder value, but most don’t walk the talk. A truly symbiotic relationship among business, government and citizens is needed to tackle this issue The private sector is often considered to be the heart of wealth creation and innovation — the late 1990s and early 2000s success story of Silicon Valley being a prime example. In this model, shareholder value is seen as the ultimate measure of a company’s success. Indeed, the idea that businesses are the most productive actors in the economy has served as a convenient justification for high incomes and great wealth. Today, however, many businesses also claim to be purpose-oriented; they are not just wed to shareholder value but are dedicated to creating stakeholder value. And yet stakeholder value has largely followed the same fate as corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) frameworks: Its transformative power has been watered down and hollowed out by overuse and underaction. It’s been value-washed. If we are to walk the talk of true stakeholder value, we must reverse two key trends: the financial sector’s propensity to invest in itself, and businesses’ prioritisation of stock buybacks. As those trends are reversed, companies and governments must embrace a new way of creating and distributing value, and that will transform society. Harvard Business Review |
7. (Productivity) An alternative to the cascade model of goals In a cascade, the leadership team sets a small number of high-level goals (the magic number three). Department leaders then work to mimic that structure fractally. For example, the marketing team looks at the topmost goals and then comes up with three of its own goals (depending on the framework, some combination of objectives, measures, etc.). The cascade is not chaotic. It is wonderfully symmetrical. But cascades are problematic: goal cascades combine too many ideas and attempt to do too many jobs. They have shades of driver trees, inputs/outputs, MBO, efforts at empowerment, context sharing, prioritization, tactics, strategy, and strategy deployment. An alternative is to create a model that maps the drivers of your business. This model should be agnostic to anything you have on your roadmap. Add measurement to that model. Prioritise points of leverage. We might consider these high-level opportunities. Identify goals for those points of leverage. Map goals to the model. It is ok if you have lots of goals. You can group/summarise them later if you need that magic slide. An early version of this becomes the basis upon which teams can start figuring out where they can have an impact, where they need to collaborate, etc. Teams might, at this point, start layering more localised goals on top of more localized models. Further explanation via The Beautiful Mess |
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