SD#58: Brand familiarity, typos and intermediacy
March 12, 2023
Welcome to the 58 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here.
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Hi friends,
Welcome to March, when the weather has no clue what to do and neither do we. Today’s newsletter is a bit more business’y than usual, don’t hate me for that. We’ll delve into brand growth and typos within emails (who knew they’re useful at times?) and how we can keep learning despite hitting a wall.
🔎 Our seven ideas this week:
1. (Marketing) Brands are successful because they’re familiar Before launching a new campaign, marketers, branding experts, and advertising practitioners often spend months trying to define what a brand should stand for. They are very fond of the concept of “brand meaning.” This is driven by the belief that consumers impute specific attributes to brands and exercise their buying prerogatives based on the meaning they assign to the brand, and how well that meaning aligns with their values. Or something like that. This is largely horseshit. Research shows us that for the most part, consumers are annoyingly impervious to understanding the finer points of product differentiation and brand meaning. Stop someone on the street today and ask them what the difference is between BMW and Mercedes-Benz? Ask them for the difference between Coke and Pepsi? Their responses will have little to no correlation to the strategic documents floating around those brands’ offices. Each of those brands has spent tens of millions of dollars over the years concocting fantasies of “differentiation.” They believe their brands are successful because of their unique “brand meaning.” But the main reason they’re successful is because they’re familiar. The real power of advertising is in having enormous numbers of people familiar with and comfortable with your brand. Getting a lot of people familiar with your brand and comfortable with it has a much higher probability of building your brand than any other theory of marketing — including the theories of brand meaning or personalisation. 👉 Bob Hoffman |
2. (Psychology) A typo in a neutral email lowers your perceived intelligence by 30%. But typos in emotion-filled notes amplify perceived emotion Email and text communication have become ubiquitous. Recent findings suggest emotional sameness between face-to-face and email communication, there is limited evidence of nonverbal behaviours in text-based communication. Especially the kinds of unintentional displays central to emotion perception in face-to-face interactions. Researchers showed that typos amplify perceptions of email sender’s emotions—both negative and positive. By contrasting perceptions of message senders who make mistakes in emotional versus unemotional contexts, it was shown that people partially excuse message sender communication errors in emotional (versus unemotional) contexts, attributing such mistakes to the sender’s emotional state rather than solely their intelligence level. These studies suggest that nonverbal behaviour in text-based and face-to-face communication may be more comparable than previously thought. 👉 Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin |
3. (Marketing) For B2B firms, investing in brand marketing is the best bet in good times, and it’s an even better bet in bad times when the pool of current buyers shrinks The most fundamental principle in B2B (and B2C) marketing is the 95/5 rule, as articulated by Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. The concept is simple: at any given time, 95% of customers are out-of-market, and only 5% of customers are in-market. Most buyers are future buyers, and marketing’s main job is to increase future sales. But during a recession, most big B2B purchases get delayed as businesses cut costs to manage their margins. Delays in purchases reduce the number of buyers in market – that’s what a recession is after all: a reduction in economic activity for two successive quarters. So the 5% of current buyers shrinks to more like 1%. We all know that marketing budgets are usually the first line item that gets cut during a recession, but the cuts are not evenly distributed. Brand advertising often gets cut the deepest, and those freed-up funds are often reallocated to lead-generation activities. But that doesn’t make much sense, because the pool of leads has contracted. So most companies are competing to serve “act now” messages to buyers, at a time when most buyers literally cannot act now. 👉 Marketing Week |
4. (Philosophy) Where you look is where you go When you’re biking you have to look out for a thing called “target fixation”: Target fixation is an attentional phenomenon observed in humans in which an individual becomes so focused on an observed object (be it a target or hazard) that they inadvertently increase their risk of colliding with the object. It is associated with scenarios in which the operator is in control of a high-speed vehicle or other modes of transportation, such as fighter pilots, race-car drivers, paragliders, and motorcyclists. In such cases, the observer may fixate so intently on the target that they steer in the direction of their gaze, which is often the ultimate cause of a collision. As with biking, so with life. Thoreau said that we find the world we look for, but if he rode a bicycle, he might’ve said, “where you look is where you go.” 👉 Austin Kleon |
5. (Productivity) After a phase of intense difficulties and incredible progress, we enter the intermediacy phase of learning where we see diminishing returns from additional study and practice The intermediate plateau contrasts sharply with the beginning phase of immersive language learning. While those early efforts are marked by some intense difficulties, they are also a period of incredible progress. In a narrow window of time, you go from total incompetence to being able to do quite a bit. In contrast, intermediacy is frustrating. You don’t feel good enough to claim the work of learning is over, but you see diminishing returns from additional study and practice. There are three theories for why we get stuck: 1) knowledge grows exponentially with the level of expertise. That means we learn key aspects quickly which results in fast growth but as we get to more intricate details our learning stalls. 2) Progress comes to rely more on unlearning than new learning. Our lack of progress is due to getting ever-more proficient in mediocre methods, whereas progress requires interrupting this natural process and rebuilding it. 3) Creative problem-solving overtakes imitating others. Humans are excellent imitators and only lacklustre problem-solvers, so when we reach those points where we can no longer imitate others but need to learn ourselves, our progress hits a wall. How can we move beyond intermediacy? 1) Exponential knowledge requires exponential effort. 2) Unlearning requires deliberate practice. 3) Expert mentorship nurtures creativity. 👉 Scott H. Young |
6. (Society) Noncompete agreements in the workforce only serve to dampen growth We’re in general agreement that “anti-competitive” behaviour is bad, and have laws against it. Yet companies have been able to convince regulators to look the other way on an increasingly popular weapon of mass entrenchment. They’re passing out OxyContin during an AA meeting. The Oxy? Noncompete agreements. Noncompete clauses are what firms use to sequester your human capital from competitors. When a new employee signs a noncompete with, say, Johnson & Johnson, they agree that when their employment ends, they won’t work at another pharmaceutical company for a designated period — usually one to two years. The irony of noncompetes is they only serve to dampen growth. The FTC estimates that noncompetes reduce employment opportunities for 30 million people and suppress wages by $300 billion per year. Multiple studies also show that noncompetes reduce entrepreneurship and business formation. Which makes sense — it’s difficult to start a business when talent pools are not accessible or allocated to their best use. Downstream, the lack of competition leads to entrenchment, which eventually results in higher prices for consumers — as one study found has occurred in health care. Everybody loses. Except, of course, the incumbent’s shareholders. 👉 No Mercy / No Malice (Scott Galloway) |
7. (Psychology) The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer This phenomenon is called Cunningham’s Law. The writer Kevin Donnellan tested out the law and reported his findings in “I spent a week being wrong online.” The results were a bit inconclusive, and it’s worth noting that Ward Cunningham, the law’s namesake, denies its paternity, and claims it is a “misquote that disproves itself by propagating through the internet.” What seems even more valuable is taking the position of the idiot, ignorant, but curious. Besides getting people riled up, claiming ignorance is a good way to overcome people’s “they must already know about X” rarity threshold. They don’t think they need to be special, obscure, or original in their replies. 👉 Austin Kleon |
👨🏫 Quote of the week:
“It’s not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?”
Henry Davis Thoreau
🎁 Fun things to click on:
Come for the gear recommendations for wildlife photography, stay for the cute pictures of baby seals. Goodbuy is a free browser extension that finds small business alternatives to Amazon and other mega-retailers. How Spotify’s Wrapped campaign for 2022 came together.
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