SD#6: innovation, restaurant psychology and Tesla
February 20, 2022
Hi friends,
Welcome to the sixth edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter on marketing, psychology, copywriting, productivity and everything in between.
Our seven ideas this week:
1. (Marketing) Marketers have a tendency to be extremely short-term focused. There are some obvious reasons for that with stock markets demanding results here and now (i.e. finance pressure), sales having to hit their quarterly goals, marketers being obsessed with optimisation. However, the revolutionary work of Peter Field and Les Binet proved us that marketing needs two types of campaigns – activation (short-term, product focused) and brand (long-term, creative focused). Despite the split, majority of marketers get obsessed with optimising their campaigns right from the get go. The reality is that creative campaigns never work on short term results and thus should never be measured over the short term. Leave them be, optimise later. |
2. (Business) It feels like the world is moving at light speed. Our world has changed dramatically in the last four/five decades and we like to attribute technological advancement to that. But if you look at it closely, there has been very few new innovations within these decades, only improvements of what we have already. Faster cars, more efficient planes, better fridges, better computers etc. What’s happening within the blockchain, web3, crypto space is definitely intriguing and you hear talks how it will revolutionise our digital space, but what really excites me are the advances we will find in psychological space. Screens telling us how quickly the next train/bus will arrive have changed the way we look at commuting way more than an increase in the number of trains running per hour. Renaming pilchards to Cornish sardines increased demand for the fish from 7 tonnes in mid 90s to 7000 tonnes in 2018. Making a train 20% faster might cost millions of dollars, while making the train journey 20% more enjoyable comes at little to no cost (e.g. fast Wi-Fi). What other large scale psychological opportunities are out there? |
3. (Marketing) Most B2B selling is done not by proving that you are better, but by sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt around alternatives. Brands aren’t there only to distinguish good products, they are there to keep away from the bad ones as well. In the Soviet Union (where my parents grew up), most of the manufacturing was done in brandless way. A factory was given a target for how many shoes need to be made that year. A different factory might have been given the same target for the same shoes to supply the population. If your shoes broke after the first day, there was no way you could complain to anyone as there were a number of factories making the same shoe. Likewise, the next time you went out to buy shoes, you did not know which one to avoid, which one produced the poor shoe for you last time. At the same time the manufacturers didn’t have much of an incentive to improve their products because other factories might ruin their reputation. Brands are there to decrease the likelihood of us choosing a bad product. In a brandless world, we would have no way to reward good companies. |
4. (Productivity) Habits of reflection and persistence form habits of success. Humans love habits. Our lives are a reflection of our habits. How fit I am right now is a reflection of my habits. How happy I am is also a result of my habits. What I repeatedly do ultimately forms the person I am. But habits don’t come into our lives easy and forming the good ones can be a challenging task. One of the most powerful habits that I find to incorporate are ones of reflection: finding opportunities to reflect on yesterday’s/last week’s happenings is a habit with a multiplying effect. You’ll notice trends when you succeed implementing other habits or how you could get back on track with them. Combine that with perseverance and you have a recipe for success. |
5. (Psychology) Restaurants have been present in our world for quite some time now. All this time has allowed them to learn of psychological tricks that we might not know they’re pulling us. For example, it is known that adjectives in menus such as ‘succulent’ add no meaning to the dish but add how valuable we might perceive it. Removing the pound (£) symbol next to the price increases the amount you’re willing to spend. Placing food in a very large plate (despite the actual food amount being the same) makes us feel like we are eating less. Using small plates makes it feel like we are eating more – note how all-you-can-eat restaurants will give you small plates. |
6. (Business) In the 70s, Sony was on the brink of releasing a music player that would change the way the world listens to music. The brilliant product designer working on the Walkman at the time decided not to add a recording button to the player. People were confused, adding the button would come at a fraction of a cost but add additional features to the device. The product designer pushed back with a hard no. A recording button would have distracted users from the main function of the device (to listen to music on the go). By reducing the number of uses for the device, they clarified the purpose of it. Sometimes less is more. Not adding extra functionality to an item can help communicate the main function. |
7. (Marketing) Throughout the 2010s, we had a number of entrepreneurs from the tech background grow mega companies (think Tesla, AirBnB, Uber, Instagram). Due to their founder’s tech background they often held the beliefs that companies don’t need marketing, a great product is better advertisement than anything else. Tesla is one of the most common examples of similar-minded people to use. Tesla’s lack of advertising may have defied the odds because of Musk, but it can’t last forever and nor can be adopted easily by others. Uber was another no-marketing policy rebel, but in 2016 realised that word-of-mouth is not enough to spread your product, launched a marketing campaign and hasn’t looked back since. |
Fun things to click on:
Wordle has taken the world by a storm, here’s a quick recap of how it happened. If you lack image editing skills like I do, this is going to be your new favorite tool. A collection of 52 essays people loved in 2021 via a Twitter thread.
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