SD#9: simplicity, brand loyalty and creative thoughts
March 13, 2022
Hi friends,
Welcome to the ninth edition of Seven Dawns, your weekly newsletter on marketing, psychology, productivity, and more.
Our seven ideas this week:
1. (Marketing) People choose Brand A over Brand B not because it is better, but because it is more good. Or in other words, it is less likely to be bad. Let’s imagine one day you need to go to Azerbaijan for a business or leisure trip and after the first day, you get food poisoning. Disastrous. The following day you still need to eat and you’re stuck with having to make a choice. On one end of the street, you have a local Azerbaijani restaurant, which didn’t bother with a Google Maps listing yet; while on the other end of the street you have a Subway. The local place could elevate your taste buds to mount Everest levels or it could handcuff you to bed with an even worse food poisoning. With Subway, you know it won’t be the best food in the world, but also you are fairly certain it won’t give you food poisoning. You most likely go with the latter. Most of our purchasing choices are made to find the option that is least likely to be bad. |
2. (Psychology) Why is simple so hard to get right? In the words of Steve Jobs “Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” Leo Tolstoy said, “There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth”. The beauty of simplicity in all areas of life is hard to overstate. There is also an evolutionary reason for it. Our brains are hardwired to make quick decisions and simplicity makes it so much easier for them to do their job. Whether you think of web design, PowerPoint presentations, copywriting or your mobile phone functions, the law of simplicity remains the same. Psychologists even have a word for it. Cognitive fluency – the ease or difficulty of completing a mental task. |
3. (Marketing) Loyalty programmes can have a negative impact more often than not. Another revelation from the great work of Byron Sharp and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. If you look at the source of sales growth, in the majority of companies it derives from new customers and repeat customers. Some marketers believe that keeping a current customer is much easier and cheaper than acquiring a new one and loyalty programmes should be employed. However, the impact of loyalty programmes is often overestimated. They have very little impact on the behaviour of regular customers. You’re mainly rewarding customers who would have bought from you anyway, whereas the real brand growth will come from increasing mental and physical availability of your brand. |
4. (Copywriting) Speaking of simplicity, it can also be applied to the art of copywriting. Best writers put big ideas into simple words. That does not mean that the idea is dumbed down. On the contrary, it encourages the reader to find details that were left out. Ernest Hemingway was a Michael Jordan playing on the court against kindergarten pupils when it comes to writing things simple. “The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water” as the old man himself wrote. |
5. (Creativity) I’ve written extensively on how we are suffering a creativity crisis in marketing. There are many reasons why I believe that is happening. The fact we’re not giving our brain the space it needs to come up with creative ideas is one of them. David Ogilvy, the advertising genius from the golden era of marketing, did not write a single advertisement in the office and there are good reasons for that. Our best ideas come when we give our brain some space to do what it wants. It might be in the café, in the shower or during a walk. It won’t come confined in an office environment, between four white walls, staring at your computer screen. |
6. (Psychology) National Institutes of Health researchers found that we tend to remember some words more than others. Interestingly, this does not depend on how often words appear in written language or if the words were more concrete. Instead, results showed that more memorable words are semantically similar or more often linked to the meanings of other words (words like “pig”, “tank”, and “door” are recalled more often than words like “cat”, “street”, or “stair”). |
7. (History) I broke my phone screen a little while ago. I usually keep my phone in the safe place of my right jeans pocket and on that day it rested cosily in the designated pocket. I wish it didn’t. I lifted a small sofa and the sharp edge of its foot navigated its way to hit my phone with intensity the likes of a 7.0 magnitude earthquake would not have seen. The screen shattered, but luckily a nifty repairman was able to bring the phone to life by placing a shiny brand new one for a hefty sum. I’ve recently learned that replaceable parts were only incorporated into our lives from the 19th century. They were popularised by Eli Whitney as he used interchangeable parts to assemble muskets in the first years of the 19th century. Before this time, each gun had to be made by hand and if it broke, one had to go to a skilled craftsman to get it repaired. Interchangeable parts meant that guns could be repaired with a set of new parts within minutes. The invention later spread to other areas of our lives and now gives many items we own a second and third life. |
Fun things to click on:
A search tool for weird old books. RhymeZone is like Google for rhyming words, if Google went to the Rhyming Gym and jacked itself up on things like searching via number of syllables, meter, beginning letter, and more.
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