SD#48: Unawareness, change and investment fees
December 11, 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) B2B brands shouldn’t fear rejection, but being unknown Humans are hardwired to fear rejection. Modern B2B companies struggle with something similar – fear of ‘brand rejection’. Marketers fear we might say the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time and catastrophically harm the business. We often see this in advertising. Brands will pause media campaigns during turbulent times or dull down creative, trying to ensure we don’t insult any potential buyers and find ourselves starved out of a customer base. But is the fear of brand rejection warranted? In B2C, surveys across 535 brands in 24 categories revealed only 9% of buyers actively reject any given brand, on average. Put another way, 91% of potential customers do not actively reject any brands. So if rejection doesn’t hinder B2B growth, what does? One thing that does stand out is unawareness. Big brands like Barclays have low unawareness (16%), whereas small brands like Standard Chartered have high unawareness (62%). That’s not a coincidence. The problem isn’t that buyers hate you – the problem is that buyers don’t even know you exist. Marketing Week |
2. (Productivity) If you try to do everything, you won’t do anything It takes discipline not to insist on doing everything yourself. Especially when you know how to do them well. Especially when you have high standards about how they should be done. Even if you enjoy doing them—whether that’s mowing your lawn or answering your phone. A glutton isn’t just someone who eats or drinks too much. Some of us are also gluttons for punishment. Gluttons for attention. Gluttons for control. It can come from a good place. We feel obligated. We feel bad spending money. We feel guilty asking for help. It doesn’t matter the source though, because the outcome is the same: We wear ourselves down. You have to be able to pass the ball…especially when somebody is open and has a better shot. Some people spend hours a month opening mail, paying bills and doing administrative paperwork. Just as easily they can sign up for paperless billing, or auto-schedule payments. Almost everything we do as responsible adults in the world is set up inefficiently. By improving our systems, we buy ourselves time and energy. And then with this time and energy, we can be better at what we do, get more done, and be more present for the people who depend on us. None of the above might come as a surprise. It’s a healthy reminder to manage our time so we can spend it the way we won’t regret it. Ryan Holiday |
3. (Psychology) Are you the same person you used to be? John Stuart Mill once wrote that a young person is like “a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” The image suggests a generalized spreading out and reaching up, which is bound to be affected by soil and climate, and might be aided by a little judicious pruning here and there. The authors of “The Origins of You” offer a more chaotic metaphor. Human beings, they suggest, are like storm systems. Each storm has its own particular set of traits and dynamics; meanwhile, its future depends on numerous elements of atmosphere and landscape. The fate of any given Harvey, Allison, Ike, or Katrina might be shaped, in part, by “air pressure in another locale,” and by “the time that the hurricane spends out at sea, picking up moisture, before making landfall.” There’s a wide range of ways in which people can relate to time in their lives. Some people live in narrative mode and others have no tendency to see their life as constituting a story or development. But it’s not just a matter of being a continuer or a divider. Some people live episodically as a form of spiritual discipline, while others are simply aimless. Presentism can be a response to economic destitution—a devastating lack of opportunities—or vast wealth. Galen Strawson notes: “There are lotus-eaters, drifters, lilies of the field, mystics and people who work hard in the present moment. . . . Some people are creative although they lack ambition or long-term aims, and go from one small thing to the next, or produce large works without planning to, by accident or accretion. Some people are very consistent in character, whether or not they know it, a form of steadiness that may underwrite experience of the self’s continuity. Others are consistent in their inconsistency, and feel themselves to be continually puzzling and piecemeal.” Life is full and variable, and we all go through adventures that may change who we are. But what matters most is that we lived it. The same you, however altered, absorbed it all and did it all. This outlook also involves a declaration of independence—independence not from one’s past self and circumstances but from the power of circumstances and the choices we make to give meaning to our lives. Dividers tell the story of how they’ve renovated their houses, becoming architects along the way. Continuers tell the story of an august property that will remain itself regardless of what gets built. As different as these two views sound, they have a lot in common. Among other things, they aid us in our self-development. The New Yorker |
4. (Productivity) It’s good to say yes when you’re starting out, wanting any opportunity, or needing variety, it’s bad to say yes when you’re overwhelmed, over-committed, or need to focus Derek Sivers, entrepreneur and author on how to make more room for what excites us most: “Most of us have lives filled with mediocrity. We said yes to things that we felt half-hearted about. So we’re too busy to react when opportunities come our way. We miss out on the great because we’re busy with the mediocre. The solution is to say yes to less. If you’re not feeling ‘Hell yeah, that would be awesome!’ about something, say no.” Derek Sivers |
5. (Marketing) People pay attention to negativity more than positivity There’s a reason why people can’t stop “doom scrolling.” In 1998, social psychologist Tiffany Ito found negative images spark more brain activity than positive or neutral images. Three years later, psychologists Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman coined the term Negativity Bias to explain the psychological phenomenon. The average click-through rate of an article increases by 63% when it has negative superlatives like bad, worst, and never in its title. Negativity gets attention, clicks, and conversions. But too much negativity shifts your brand from friend to foe. Your buyers unconsciously pay attention to negative news, trends, and stories, so they can avoid potential losses in the future. Like moths are attracted to light, they look for negativity, hoping that knowing this information will keep them safe in the future. Buyers aren’t looking for an onslaught of consistent negativity from your brand, though. A little negativity can drive action, but too much can drive buyers in the opposite direction. Customer Camp |
6. (Career) People tend to systematically overvalue near-term over long-term rewards. This effect seems to be even stronger in more ambitious people How can smart, ambitious people stay working in an area where they have no long-term ambitions? A good analogy for the mistake they are making can be found in computer science. A classic problem in computer science is hill climbing. Imagine you are dropped at a random spot on hilly terrain, where you can only see a few feet in each direction (assume it’s foggy or something). The goal is to get to the highest hill. At any given moment, take a step in the direction that takes you higher. The risk with this method is if you happen to start near the lower hill, you’ll end up at the top of that lower hill, not the top of the tallest hill. A more sophisticated version of this algorithm adds some randomness to your walk. You start with lots of randomness and reduce the amount of randomness over time. This gives you a better chance of meandering near the bigger hill before you start your focused, non-random climb. Another and generally better algorithm has you repeatedly drop yourself in random parts of the terrain, do simple hill climbing, and then after many such attempts step back and decide which of the hills were highest. People early in their career should learn from computer science: meander some in your walk (especially early on), randomly drop yourself into new parts of the terrain, and when you find the highest hill, don’t waste any more time on the current hill no matter how much better the next step up might appear. Cdixon |
7. (Investing) When it comes to investing, you get what you don’t pay for. Saving on investment fees means you get to keep more of your money Compulsory disclaimer – none of the the below is financial or legal advice. If you don’t understand how the stock market works, it’s a simple task for financial advisors to pitch you an overly complex investment fund. If you don’t know what to look for, it’s easy to assume that complexity is important to outperform. The advisor will likely trot out a bunch of statistics about how well the fund has done in the past and reassure you that they aren’t going to give you some boring old index fund. The message is clear: “if you invest with me, you’ll outperform.” A 2017 paper titled “Use of Leverage, Short Sales, and Options by Mutual Funds” found that investment funds that use risky, complex tactics like leverage (debt) and trading options lead to bad outcomes for investors. Often, advisors will use complexity to justify their higher fees. We’ve been told, “you get what you pay for” so many times throughout our life that many of us have come to view the terms “expensive” and “quality” as interchangeable. While that might be true when you’re buying a pair of winter boots, it couldn’t be further from the truth when it comes to investment products. Research from Morningstar has shown that investment fees are the best predictor of the performance of an investment fund. The lower the investment fees, the higher the expected returns. Making of a Millionaire |
Fun things to click on:
Looria took all the most talked about brand mentions on Reddit and identified the most popular products. A list of tools for creators. One tweet biography of every English and British monarch since Alfred the Great in 886.
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